There’s a review of the Magellan 6000T coming out of the UK that takes a look at the new high end Magellan market entry that includes things like Traffic and Bluetooth handsfree calling. In a previous review by Pocket Lint, they thought that the Magellan 6000T was “disappointing”. The review wades through some pluses and minuses of the unit, like the fact that the bluetooth calling was solid, and the navigation was good. The issues are mainly with the product design (10 buttons surrounding a touchscreen makes for a repetitive and a bit unnecessary design) and the software interface. This is troubling as I am finding that software issues in other units that I use can weigh on you daily as you try to go through normal tasks.

Their summary says “Looking at specs alone the Magellan Roadmate 6000t is a tempting proposition and the core functions such as Bluetooth and, essentially, address finding are pretty good. However, some poor physical and software design decisions threaten to undermine that good work and over complicate what should really be straight forward tasks. However, you can pick one up for a little under £300 if shop around, so there is a silver lining at least.”

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The Magellan Crossover GPS is a good bit of marketing and an interesting concept for a GPS. A lot of people have written in about the idea of using their car GPS for the purposes of Geocaching, and for the most part, you can’t really do it and have a lot of fun. That is unless you have a unit designed to be in the outdoors with the ability to take on some of the demands of the outdoors. It’s got the ability to use Topographic maps, as well as a compass and a tracker.

CNet has a review of the Magellan Crossover GPS up and overall they thought that the unit is a mixed bag. The features are attractive, but overall the performance is mixed at best. The unit is big for road navigation and that can hurt on a long hike, but most folks may use this 95% on the road and 5% for short hikes, and if that’s your expectation, I wouldn’t worry about it. The CNet team didn’t seem to take it for long hikes in the great outdoors, but did notice that in the wild streets of San Francisco the unit sometimes told them to turn after the street went by.

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PC Mag has a review up on the Magellan Maestro 4040, the new middle of the Series 4000 line of widescreen GPS navigation systems from Magellan. They redesigned the interface, which was very much needed, as the older units looked like they were a bit cartoonish, and pixelated; way to out of date. The sad thing is the underlying system was pretty solid and offered a lot. Anyway, the Magellan Maestro 4040 comes with maps preloaded, a SiRF star III chipset, text-to-speech (TTS) capability and Bluetooth pairing to for handsfree phone calls. Not bad.

Craig Ellison liked the re-designed hardware and software with special notes on the large 4.3-ince screen, the new user interface, and the AAA TourBook integration. He said that while the Bluetooth Phone integration wasn’t as good as the current state of the art Garmin systems, that “A large screen, fresh new user interface, AAA’s TourBook functionality, and a great price make the Maestro 4040 a compelling in-car navigation device.”
ReadMore at PC Mag