Not Gellin' With Magellan

At least not after yesterday.

After less than 90 days of use, My Magellan GPS had decided to pine for fjords.

Unfortunately, it has decided not to even display the route to those fjords but remained pretty locked up and fixed on a route on Woodward, even when I'm not on Woodward. This made it quite difficult to use it for navigation rather than as a paperweight.

Even a reset would only solve the problem for a short while and then it would lock up yet again, which is, as they say, not optimal.

Luckily, it decided to give up the ghost both when I wasn't going anywhere new and just within the Costco 90-day electronic return period so it was an easy exchange for a nice new Garmin nüvi 2455LMT.

I was easily able to transfer the waypoints that were in my old Garmin C330 to the Nuvi by using EasyGPS and the new Nuvi seems to be working very well indeed. This was convenient and beat the manual entries of all my stored waypoints as there had been no way to transfer from the Garmin to the Magellan - crazy that companies can't standardize waypoint storage types, and certainly a barrier to switching brands.

One of the annoying peculiarities of the Magellan was that when it was in map mode (when you don't select a destination or ask for navigation instructions), instead of displaying the approaching street on the title bar it would display the name the street you were on. This is less than helpful. I typically know what street I'm on and when I'm looking for a particular street to turn on, I could use a heads up rather than having to search for the name as it scrolls by on the map and was often cut off or too small to quickly see. The Garmin, by contrast displays the upcoming street on the title bar in map mode making it much easier to navigate.

Overall I'd have to say the Garmin is superior, both in terms of speed in calculating routes and in user features. I do miss the Magellan's landmark suggestions - not only would it say turn at X street but it would say for example, "At the BP Gas Station, turn left, X Street". Which was kinda cool, and surprisingly accurate.

So I'm now back to easy navigation with Garmin, which I probably should have gone with in the first place.