This is without doubt the most disapointing purchase I have ever made. When looking for a GPS that would give me the best mapping off-road as well as being a good street directory, the Magellan Crossover offered the best potential at the time. What attracted me to it was that it came with both Topo and Street maps on separate SD Cards and if required, I could also purchase Marine Charts as well.

I have persevered with this thing for almost two years and quite frankly, it does not deliver. With a purchase price up around $1200-00 when I bought it, you would expect a better result than it provides. Back up service from Next Destination who are the Australian Distributors is also very ordinary. The mapping is out of date and on many occasions when driving on roads that had been in place for several years, the GPS was showing me in the middle of a paddock.

Problems Experienced.   

Set up a trip in the trip planner and after a while it would just hang itself. The reset button wouldn’t work and I would have to wait for the battery to go flat (8 hours) before it would reset itself and start operating again.

Loading addresses to navigate to was anything but user friendly. You had to know exactly where the address was including the exact suburb or the street address would not be in the data base. eg Loading an address for Mt Isa and it wasn’t there. After doing some more searching, I found that the suburb entered should have been Mt Isa City…… not Mt Isa. The option should be there to enter the street names and then the processor should throw up suburb options to match the address for us to select from.

You need to be an absolute computer geek to get it to talk to your computer. Personalising the unit is far too difficult for the normal person because of this lack of user friendly interface.

Whilst out on the Canning Stock Route last year, we had Hema paper maps and 3 GPS units with us. Whenever we did comparisons on position readings at the various wells enroute, the Navman unit showed exactly the same reading as the Hema map, the Tom Tom showed a variation of a few minutes and my Magellan was anything up to 20 minutes out.

I have tried to store track info for future reference and it will only hold 8 tracks. Without the ability to down load these, it ended up full and hung itself again so all info was lost.

All I can say about this unit is that I am looking forward to trialling the new Hema Navigator. I wish it had been available when I purchased the Magellan.