ConFigures

Magellan Maestro 3225 GPS Review

Summary: love the predictive texting; some quibbles with routing, usability, street name pronunciation

After my Garmin i5 developed problems, I took it back to Costco (full refund, pleasant service!) and started looking at current offerings. I couldn’t find any GPS that had *everything* I wanted (didn’t like the map displays on some, usability on others, and so on), so I decided to get the cheapest car GPS unit currently available at Costco, the Magellan Maestro 3225. I figured any shortcomings would be soothed by the thought that at least I’d only paid $162 for it. I got it on Friday, and it worked right out of the box (well, out of the plastic packaging — I stuffed everything in a bag in case I ever have to return this one to Costco).

I’ve been pretty satisfied with the Maestro 3225 so far. It’s about the size of my Palm Zire, so it fits in that case (I keep my Zire in my old flip-out IIIx case). Touchscreen UI. The lithium-ion battery holds about 3 hours’ charge.

Map display: about 3 by 2 inches, plenty big and bright (automatically changes to night vision based on the time, and I like that the route I’m taking shows up as green, with white turn arrows. Sometimes it goes into a split screen display when approaching a turn. I’m not crazy about this, but it’s ok.

Address Entry: My favorite thing about the Maestro! Uses predictive texting when spelling city/street names, and house numbers (e.g., all houses on my street start with “17″, so it filled that in for me when I was putting in my home address).

Usability: OK in most respects. I like its path to the address book (multiple ways to add entries). I wish it had a path back to “Show Map” (from anywhere) as quick and easy as it was on my i5. There’s an instructional CD I haven’t looked at yet. Still, I was able to figure out most functions pretty easily. The one that took me the longest was how to pull up a route review to do a sanity check on where the Maestro was taking me — unlike on my old i5’s menu approach, this navigation function is reached by clicking on an arrow on the touchscreen map.

POI: Comes with 1.3 million pre-programmed locations. It found one of my favorite Indian restaurants and a movie theater in Virginia pretty easily, but not a particular clothes store I was looking for. There’s a way to add more POIs, but I need to pick up another SD flash drive to try it.

Performance: Seems faster than my i5 was. Works inside malls, houses (to show to my friends).

Voice/pronunciation: One voice, seems clear but pronounces some streetnames oddly, and not just the obscure ones (Maryland=”May-ree-land”?).

Accessories: Comes with a instructional CD, a car charger, a USB-data cable (plus a house charger I’m not using, and a mount disk and a highly-adjustable but big and clunky mount I’m not using).