Magellan RoadMate 2010 Review: You have arrived at your destination

When people talk about gadgets that revolutionized the last decade, there are two whose popularity remains unrivaled; GPS and the iPod. But despite their incredible success few have thought to merge the two.  GPS manufacturer Magellan is making a valiant effort to combine these two technologies with the release of Magellan RoadMate 2010.  Is this GPS app the real deal?  Or does their portable mapping lead us astray?

If you’re new to the GPS game, let me assure you that the Magellan Roadmate 2010 app offers all the bells and whistles that you’d find if you were to buy a standalone Magellan Roadmate device.  In fact, the software this is sporting more closely resembles what you’ll see in newer models of the Roadmate rather than the budget priced entry-level devices.  But unlike other GPS devices, this one has the added benefit of playing friendly with other aspects of your iPhone/iPod Touch.  Want to play music?  You can do so from in the app.  Is someone calling?  You can answer it and then go right back to driving.

The problem is that it doesn’t do any of these features incredibly well.  If you want to take a call it kicks you out of the app and then reboots, meaning if you’re on speakerphone while driving and expecting to hear “turn left in 800 metres,” you’re going to be sorely disappointed.  And if you’re expecting the convenience and music browsability that the iPod is known for, here too you’ll find yourself out of luck.  The Magellan app will only play playlists — not individually browsed tracks.  While you can build playlists in the app, the whole experience is miles away from the “OneTouch” mentality that RoadMate is famous for.

Still — everything we’ve mentioned so far is just bells and whistles.  At the end of the day the only thing that matters here is navigation, and here the performance can be a little hit and miss.  Unless your device has an uninterrupted view of the sky the GPS signal is going to drop in and out on an incredibly regular basis.  If you have a car mount kit, though, you’ll be near enough the front window that you shouldn’t have any problems maintaining a signal.  But if you’re planning on tossing your iPhone in the passenger seat while you drive?  Forget about it.

Performance from that point gets spotty at best.  While the device is almost always good at mapping out the quickest possible routes (we had a few tiny exceptions, but nothing really worth mentioning) it failed to keep up with our actual location and kept notifying us of turns 40 feet after we were supposed to make them.  It was a nightmare.

With an experience this bad, you must be wondering how we could dare describe the navigation as “a little hit and miss.”  What we’ve described so far was the miss.  What we experienced and quickly came to love was the hit.  That hit?  It has a name;  the Magellan Premium Car Kit.

Available as a seperate purchase is Magellan’s Premium Car Kit, a $129 accessory that will boost the iPhone’s GPS signal exponentially, provide an in-car mount for your device, charge it, and provide an enhanced speaker as well.  In terms of turning your iPhone into a fully functional navigation system, this thing is a must-buy.  Our experience with the Magellan RoadMate 2010 before and after using the car kit was as different as night and day.  Once connected there was no doubt in our minds that RoadMate 2010 could easily keep up with the stiff competition from standalone GPS devices.

With the kit attached no turns were ever missed, no signal ever lost, and route recalculation would happen the moment I varied from the route.  It was fabulous.  Once we got used to it we quickly delved in to all of the other terrific features the app had to offer.  Entering new addresses is a snap, OneTouch menu options let you easily find the nearest gas stations and other points of interest.  You can even assign favorite locations to the One Touch menu in case you’re looking to make return trips.  RoadMate 2010 is a fully-featured device when compared to standalone units on the market, and with the car kit in place we couldn’t have been happier with the performance.

Still, there were a few things that we couldn’t help but nitpick about when it came to the car kit.  An enhanced speaker is nice, but what this kit really needed was an FM transmitter.  Newer cars might be built to incorporate an external audio source but those of us cruising around in 10 year old cars tend to send our audio across the airwaves.  And then there’s the price.  $129 wouldn’t seem so bad if it included a redemption code for RoadMate 2010, but it doesn’t.  You’ll have to buy both products separately to get them to work together, bringing your grand total to just under $220.  That’s about the price of a standalone mid-range GPS device.

It may sound like we’re dumping on the car kit, but nothing could be further from the truth.  It has a number of great features we’ve yet to mention.  For example, unlike most car mounts this one is designed to fit an iPhone in a protective case.  I keep my iPhone in an OtterBox case and had no problem getting it to fit.  The kit provides options for mounting to dash or window, allows you to pivot the device in any direction or position you might want, but most importantly; it boosts that GPS signal to an incredible degree.

When combined with the Magellan Premium Car Kit, Magellan RoadMate 2010 offers the same top notch performance as Magellan’s standalone RoadMate GPS device.  The two are comparable in price as well.  The only difference here is that Magellan RoadMate 2010 for the iPhone has the added bonus of simply being an iPhone.  It’s one less device to lose, it offers an enhanced speaker should anyone call, and you can play all of your music from inside the app.  It should also be noted that the Car Kit enhances the GPS of the device itself, and not just for RoadMate purposes.  If you need to check out other apps that utilize GPS the Premium Car Kit will make them infinitely more accurate.

While the Magellan RoadMate 2010 app can be purchased independent of the Car Kit, it’s not something we recommend.  On it’s own the app simply isn’t reliable enough to be counted on when trying to find your way in a strange city.  Still, it’s hard to blame Magellan.  The iPhone’s built-in GPS simply isn’t developed well enough to hand this sort of task.  Magellan saw this dilemma and came up with a solution, albeit at a price.

If you’re in the market for a new GPS device and prepared to spend what you’ll need to in the standalone marketplace, you’ll easily find Magellan’s RoadMate 2010 and Premium Car Kit to be a winning combination.  Just don’t expect satisfactory performance if you buy the app alone.

You can download Magellan RoadMate 2010 North America for $79.99 on  iTunes.  Check out magellangps.com for information on how to purchase the Magellan Premium Car Kit.

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