Magellan Roadmate 1212 GPS Navigator
The Magellan 1212 comes full of useful features at a low price point for the budget conscious. It provides good value for money with its stylish, pocket-size design that includes an intuitive, new user interface that guides drivers to their destination via voice and on-screen prompts. The Roadmate series is designed to be slimmer and more portable for people on the go. Featuring the same look and feel as the Magellan Maestro models, the Magellan Roadmate 1212 aims to make their ways into people's pockets without revving up the price.
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Design
The familiar 3.5 standard touchscreen full color display is featured in the Magellan Roadmate 1212. It manages to keep a thin profile so that there is no reason for people to leave home without it. For a budget device, it looks pretty stylish to carry around.
Look and Feel
The main menu screen of the Magellan Roadmate 1212 manages to keep it very simple by having only 3 large icons being displayed in the screen with the other options a bit smaller. This puts the emphasis on ease of use, which should make it pretty appealing to those trying GPS devices for the very first time. Bringing up the map is fairly simple with the touch of an icon and planning a trip can be done by similar means.
The map interface isn’t all that different compared to other Magellan Maestro models. All of the general controls can be found onscreen on the edges of the map giving users pretty good focus on what’s going on in the area. The zoom controls are split apart and would have been better off together so zooming can be done with one hand. Overall, anyone should be able to go by the menus and learning the device all together without reading too much of the manual which is always a good thing.
Performance
There is some lagging involved most noticeably when some onscreen buttons are pressed. In most cases, you need to wait or sometimes even pressing it again. The Magellan 1212 houses the Centrality Atlas III Processor, which gives the device a fairly significant boost in performance when navigating.
The Magellan 1212 can be used without any power for up to 3 hours until a recharge is needed. This below average battery life is to be expected though from a budget model.
Navigation
GPS beginners will be delighted to know that there are 6 million points of interest that are preprogrammed within the system. With this, people can quickly pinpoint locations to gas stations, restaurants, ATMs, and other key landmarks in all 50 states of the US and Canada too.
Total beginners will find it rather simple in getting to their next destination by entering an address or a city and letting the Magellan 1212 do the rest. The QuickSpell feature that has been present in most other models also appears in the Roadmate making the input of addresses even easier. People looking to make some basic trips to short destinations should be contented with this device.
Alternatively, users can load up the map in either 2-D or 3-D display to check on the surroundings and any POI’s nearby. From there, routes can be customized according to fastest time, shortest distance, frequency of motorways used, and toll road avoidance.
Extra Features
The widely known feature that is present in most Magellan models is the popular QuickSpell feature. Many have found this feature to be a huge time saver because it effectively predicts the spelling of street names while dimming out any irrelevant characters.
The 1212 model also supports Text-to-Speech, a common technology, but very useful in GPS devices it can voice out any street name that’s encountered giving more specific and accurate directions compared to the prerecorded ones.
It also has some other extras like an address book for storing custom points of interests and automatic re-routes whenever detours are needed. You can even back this data up to an SD card that you can insert right in the device’s SD card slot.
Finally, there is an auto night view feature that adjusts both the color and contrast for good visibility for nighttime navigation.
Conclusion
The Magellan 1212 is highly affordable despite its random quirks at times. But, the user interface is very friendly and can greatly appeal both first-time GPS users and those seeking a low cost alternative. It’s packed with great features including the more important TTS support and looks pretty stylish for a budget device.
Actual user review :
"I received this GPS as a gift. I can't say enough good things about it.. I am not one to travel a lot, primarily because I don't like highway travel. I used to go online for alternate routes (mapquest, etc) and always found myself lost due to poor directions. When I got this GPS I had No idea how to use it. I plugged it into my car lighter and it immediately turned on and found my location- I was leery at first, however, when I typed in my destination and clicked on "least use of freeways" I found alternate routes to all of my destinations and the directions were perfect and accurate- it's extremely easy to use- I LOVE It.. 5 stars all the way"
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