Magellan RoadMate 3050T Portable GPS Navigator for North America
by GPS Reviews
Filed under Magellan GPS
Magellan RoadMate 3050T Portable GPS Navigator for North America
The Magellan TrafficKit provides live traffic updates that enable you to avoid road construction, accidents, and other delays, plus it comes with a free 3-month subscription. The RoadMate 3000 provides the same easy-to-use touch screen and amazing features as the RoadMate 2000 with the addition of multi-media access so you can plug in your MP3 player and picture viewer. SmartVolume automatically increases the volume when your speed exceeds 45 mph. Preloaded with maps of 50 US states, Canada, and Puerto Rico and over 6 million points of interest. Has 4GB hard disk, SD card slot, integrated battery, and quick release cradle.
User Ratings and Reviews
3 Stars Good product, poor support
Overall I like my Magellan 3050T as a roduct. It has saved me a lot of time & gas in finding addresses and routing around traffic. I recommended it to everyone, that is until I had to deal with tech support to get an out-of-date map upgrade.
Despite all of the promises, they don’t call back, they’ll escalate to supervisors who don’t exist or don’t care, and no matter how much data you give to Navteq about errata in the maps Magellan devices use, the updates and POI updates they provide will always be at least a year out of date. I’ve owned mine a little over a year and have been reporting all sorts of corrections, but the new data is still a year old so the corrections aren’t in there.
My advice: find yourself a non-Magellan, modern GPS which can speak the names of the streets and yet still can grab the traffic updates.
1 Star Don’t buy
Magellan Customer service is the worst customer service I have ever dealt with. They offer a free 30 day map update since all of their products ship with out of date maps. This would be a good thing except it is in the fine print of their products and their customer support email address that their website list is the wrong address. I had to get through to their customer service by posting a bad review on their website. By the time they responded my unit was beyond the 30 day limit and they refused to give me the update. This is a bad business practice. Garmin has a 60 day guarantee which is posted directly on their website in plain view.
5 Stars Great GPS for the money
I purchased two of these GPS systems. This was well worth the money. None of these GPS’s are ‘perfect’, but I recommend the Magellen 3050T.
3 Stars Magellan 3050T – Good GPS, reasonable mapsm, poor traffic warning system
I have owned this since Christmas. I also had a problem with a zoom button sticking, but got an exchange unit easily, that works very well. It was easy to set up and use.
I use this mainly in the NW, from OR anf WA to BC Canada. I have also taken it on business trips to MA, TN, CA, CT.
It works very well in urban areas, but the map can be inaccurate or even misleading in rural areas. It is no good for traveling around logging roads in Oregon. It does not distinguish between private and public roads, and if anything it actually makes it easier to get lost – I have experienced the GPS suddenly recalibrating and advising that you should drive 5 miles to “the route” but with no indication how to do so.
POI quite good but not comprehensive. E.g. shows about 4 gas stations or ATM out of 6 in a given area.
Biggest disappointment is that there does not seem to be any map updates available. The web site said there would be updates in June, now postponed to September, but still nothing. It would also be better if you could scan or pan across the map on the screen of the unit.
The traffic kit is useless, at least in along the I5 from Portland to Seattle to Vancouver BC. It will tell you if there are road works, but I have never had it give advance warning of a traffic jam or roadblock. Maybe in other areas it works OK.
Battery lasts about 2 hours.
I have only had to use tech service once, and they responded quickly and knowledgeably.
Overall this is an easy to use and reliable GPS, the traffic kit is not too good, and it would be better if you could download newer maps. I think it a little expensive for what it delivers.
4 Stars Not bad
We use our RoadMate 3050T on our motorcycle, attached to the handlebars with a “Ram” mount designed to hold the Roadmate. I didn’t really trust it at first because the RoadMate cradle was just plastic but after over 7000 miles of bumps it seems as secure as when we first put it on. Ram mounts are great and they make them for cars as well, something you might consider if you can’t use the suction cup mounting setup included with the 3050T.
I upgraded the firmware on our 3050T to version 3.11 and will probably upgrade to the new maps when they come out in September of ‘07. I do not use the traffic kit as we don’t travel most of the cities covered by that service.
It seems that on cloudy days the unit has more trouble , depending on number of trees in the area, it may take a long time to setup – this is important because some times, especially on cloudy days our 3050T seems to freeze up, we may be miles down the road and realize this and need to turn it off and back on again to get things going again. This did mess us up one time because we missed the turn off we needed because it was froze up. We seem to have more problems with it in the first half hour or so, many times it freezes up a few miles down the road and after rebooting it is ok again.
It seems to get us to our destination, but not always the best way. I also loaded a personal POI file of all the Harley dealers and it lets us know when we are withing 1 mile of any dealer. If you are in a parking lot it is more difficult to see which way to go – it will say “proceed to route” – now this may be easily seen with good eyes, but I need to stop and put on reading glasses to read the smaller details. Many times I “proceeded to route” to find I started out wrong and had to make a U turn. Once underway it seems OK. Yes, it does annoy you with “make a U turn” when you don’t turn where it planned, but in the end it recalculates and finds another way – I set mine up for 2 miles for a detour.
With the exception of very bright direct sunlight, I can usually see the maps pretty easily and the screen does bring up a big arrow to let you know ahead of time a turn is near- I don’t use the split screen and the arrow fill the entire display with the name of the road almost big enough for me to read without my reading glasses.
In congested areas , such as cloverleafs with several ways to go it seems to be off a little on when to turn, you really need to pay attention to the road signs at that point.
Overall, I like it, use it every time we ride providing it isn’t raining hard enough to make it wet.Many times it has gotten us out of areas we were in that were new and strange and we had no idea where we were going. Likewise many times I was able to use the maps to find a way around traffic congestion.
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