Magellan RoadMate 700 - 3.8 in. Car GPS Receiver

Recently I bought a Magellan Roadmate 700. To test it, I took a road trip with my family from San Diego to Canada and back. Having never been on such a long road trip, I wanted to see how it performed in places we've never been before and had no idea how to get around. The goal was to never have to pull out a paper map to find our way.


The MR700 came with the latest version of the software as of this writing, version 4.3.2. The MR700 has a built-in hard drive that contains detailed maps of the United States and major portions of Canada. I bought the MR700 a week in advance so I could test it locally around town to get the hang of its quirks.

There are three aspects to the MR700 I will discuss below: Its physical design, mapping ability, and points of interest. Then I will present some ideas on how Magellan can make the product even better.

Physical Design
The MR700 is just a bit bigger than a thick paperback. It's light and when removed from its base, fits into a large purse , backpack or coat pocket. You wouldn't leave a $1000 bill in the glove box would you? Its best to wrap it in a towel or foam or the box it came in to keep the screen from getting scratched (or worse, cracked). Using the windshield mount is easy and if you brace the MR700 against the dashboard, you don't get a lot of jiggle while the vehicle is in motion. Despite some rough roads, the windshield mount never came loose.

The MR700 generates a lot of heat, but this did not appear to impact its performance. It does not generate any appreciable noise that you will hear over the sound of your vehicle. The device is also resistant to hard shutdowns (often caused when you start the vehicle with the MR700 running). It rebooted flawlessly every time.

Mapping Ability
To determine where you are, the MR700 uses the publicly available Global Positioning System (GPS). Before you first turn it on, Magellan warns you it may take several minutes to locate the GPS satellites. The only time we ever had a problem locating satellites was underground (duh!) and when we first turned the device on in a city with many large skyscrapers and other buildings. If we went into a large city with the device already on, the MR700 retained a good memory of the satellite positions and we never lost our place.

The device's ability to track your position to a map is very good to an accuracy of about 150 feet. So if you miss an off ramp on the freeway, you sometimes have to travel a ways before the MR700 realizes you're off course. Once it does, it quickly reroutes you with directions to get back on track.

The software does an excellent job of map position placement, except in places of recent construction. A freeway by my house finished major changes last year. The MR700 got very confused in that spot. On older roads the MR700 was spot on both in the U.S. and Canada.

When we first crossed the border in Canada we were getting some confusing readings from the MR700. It wasn't warning us properly about upcoming turns. The problem seemed to clear up after I switched the map mode from miles to kilometers (Canada uses the metric system), but this may have been a coincidence.

Let's talk about routing. After my week testing the MR700 one thing became clear: The MR700 didn't always pick what I would have considered the best route to a destination. With some destinations it was very clever. With others, it seemed to give too much weight to poor street selections. Sometimes this happened regardless of the routing option you picked ("least time", or "least use of freeways", etc.). While this never caused a serious problem in places I was unfamiliar with (I didn't know a better route anyway) it was almost annoying in somewhat familiar places, or when I was routing to a new place starting from a familiar place.

Points of Interest
Magellan says they include millions of points of interest, including restaurants, hotels, museums, tourist attractions and many others. I believe them! However, take those entries with a grain of salt. For example, the MR700 indicates two restaurants within walking distance to my house. Neither one exists. It also points to several restaurants in my neighborhood that went out of business over a year ago. It seemed to have a good handle on most fast food places, hotels, Starbucks and even some unexpected places like bed & breakfasts and small attractions like some lavender farms in Washington. We used it to find Butchart Gardens in Victoria, Canada (what a beautiful place). When we got hungry afterwards we used it to find the nearest Taco Time fast food chain since we'd never been (Taco Bell's better). We even used it to find some great out-of-the-way places to eat we would never have found on my own during the trip: If you ever find yourself in Redding, CA, try Country Waffles. They make the best berry & whipped cream waffle I've ever had.

The MR700 has a great feature to find the nearest point of interest but be careful: it could be in front of you or behind you. No one wants to go back the way they came on a trip.

Let's Make It Better
The MR700 was reliable and accurate for our travel needs. Never once did we have to pull out a paper map to find our way. Kudos to the makers of Magellan. Here's a list of features that would make Magellan the defacto standard for auto navigation. I'm not saying they are easy to implement, but you have to have vision.

1. TOUR GUIDE. Imagine driving down a long stretch of boring highway when suddenly, your MR700 chimes, "On the left is the Smith Hotel. An alcoholic, Mr. Smith murdered his wife in 1892. Now her ghost is said to wander the halls of this converted mansion. Do you want to know more?" You bet I do! I want the option to hear the whole story and to route to the location. Because this feature would get annoying in large cities with many attractions, I should have the ability to sort by category which topics the MR700 will report on, or even turn it off all together.

2. HITCHHIKER'S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY. As I described above, in Redding, CA is a little restaurant called Country Waffle. There were no road signs to point the way to this little gem of a breakfast place and it's too far off the freeway for any but the most adventurous of travelers to find. But doesn't Country Waffle sound better than the McDonalds drive-through again? Magellan has a customer base that by its nature is always on the road. Our collective knowledge about destinations we have visited is sure to be better than any one, two or three travel guides. The MR700 needs a feature to allow this customer base to braindump this knowledge into a database. The MR700 needs access to this collective knowledge so when you're looking for breakfast in Redding, you'll see my review and know where to go. Someone could have warned us how far from the action the Best Western, Vancouver was. We had to find a new hotel! Data input would be handling by a rating and review system similar to Netflix. Customers would rate points of interest from an Internet-enabled web browser. The MR700 would download these updates from Magellan (perhaps wirelessly? See Wireless Internet access below). Bad reviews, say from travelers trying to protect their "secret" fishing hole, would sink to the bottom of the review list (becoming virtually unread) as good reviews rose to the top.

3. IMPROVED SEARCH. The MR700 has a great capability to find all restaurants or other points of interest, based on how close they are. The problem is that the nearest place may be behind you. We want to go forward, not backward! Also, the nearest place may be 15 miles off the freeway when what you're really looking for is a place 20 miles up but only 2 miles off the freeway. We want to go forward, not sideways! Finally, the MR700 always lists places alphabetically. If you're in a new city, how will you know the name of some restaurant? Anyway, I don't care what the name is when I'm hungry, all I know is I want Chinese food. I need the ability to refine searches like this: All Chinese restaurants, ahead only, no more than one mile from the freeway.

4. IMPROVED ROUTING. Where are my waypoints?! Sometimes a driver wants to pick some hotspots to stop along a journey (or troublespots to avoid). Way points are a great way to give a driver more control. Also, when I start from my hometown on a journey to say, the Grand Canyon, I know all my local directions. I don't need the MR700 to tell me to turn left on my home street. It would be great if I could direct the MR700 to start giving directions after a certain point (and no, I don't want to leave it turned off until I reach that point smarty pants!) :-P

5. WIRELESS INTERNET. The holy grail of navigation. Download new maps in near real-time. The device can check the Internet for which freeways are congested or where bad weather is brewing and ask if you want to reroute around or warn you if you should get snow chains. With an Internet connection, the possibilities are endless.

I hope you found this review helpful. if you ever have any questions, drop me a line: bluezoo7 @ hotmail.com.