Last Friday, before we left for Vegas, I stopped by our local Costco to look for a GPS receiver. We were going to be heading for various soccer fields around town and I needed a good way to find them. The only product Costco carried was the Magellan Roadmate 1212. I paid about $120 for it.
I love it.
The 1212's voice is a pleasant female one, so we named her Gina Patrina. Along with our last name, that makes her initials GPS.
:-)
Gina Patrina is easy to use and quickly finds routes and recalculates them when you make a mistake. I haven't yet figured out how to save addresses into memory, but I'm sure we'll find that in time. The best part about Gina Patrina is that she knows where things are. We needed to find an Outback Steakhouse. All we had to do was go to Points of Interest on the menu and type in "Outback." She then gave us a list of Outbacks closest to our present location. Tapping on the first one gave us the course to get there. We used that feature several times to great effect.
Gina Patrina found her satellites quickly. At the hotel, we parked in a covered spot, but as soon as we drove out into the open, she figured out where she was. Her transition from San Diego to Las Vegas was pretty quick, too.
I'd recommend the Magellan Roadmate 1212.
5 comments:
I have been equally pleased with my Garmin, and I was stimulated to buy into this technology by owning a handheld Garmin (for navigating around the elk hunting grounds of the Indian Peaks wilderness) and a friend's Tom-Tom.
The beauty of the units was cemented for me when I passed over the Canadian border on my fall hunting trip to Alberta. Seamless.
And the human factors, when compared to trying to read directions from a MapQuest printout, are outstanding.
For me, it's a "can't live without".
The only irritating aspect are the reviewers who post on Amazon and the like saying stuff like "Well, I tried it out on my route to work/Starbucks/girlfriend and it took an inconvenient route". Excuse the technology for not being telepathic. It's an algorithm, dude. Get a life.
We have the previous edition, forget the model name, of Magellan. We call her Gloria.
It's nice. Unfortunately, the maps are starting to get out of date, and they want $80 for new maps. I can almost buy a new model for that.
We have hand held GPSs for our geocaching hobby. Overall, the garmin are better. My Magellan hand held has good reception of the satelites but the interface is clunky. Still learning though.
It's especially nice, when you take the thing on vacation.
Saving is in the address book of the enter address function.
I wrote a review of this model too, finding that it can be pressed into service for geocaching. I wrote instructions for how. My review is at amazon.com
http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&ct=res&cd=2&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FMagellan-RoadMate-1212-3-5-Inch-Navigator%2Fdp%2FB0014LA4NM&ei=ZN6tSaPFGZDQnQeBz7W9Bg&usg=AFQjCNFMtwh73TaEabpak9ESDlTGCOTo8A&sig2=meCHyW31tRxmfSleiSDLkg
and
my blog
http://tomsthird.blogspot.com/2008/11/geocaching-with-magellan-roadmate-1212.html
I'm new to blogging. Can you show me how you are going to link to my post? I want to reciprocate.
Tom
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