Magellan(R) Unveils Next Generation Maestro(TM)

Magellan Maestro 4700 Boasts a New Design with a 4.7-inch Display, Voice Command, Bluetooth, and Highway Lane Assist

SANTA CLARA, Calif., July 6 /PRNewswire/ — Magellan, one of the leading GPS brands, introduces the Magellan Maestro 4700 GPS device. The ultra-slim device features a wide 4.7-inch color touch screen and includes many premium features to deliver a robust navigation experience for users. In addition to Magellan's OneTouch user interface, the Magellan Maestro 4700 device also performs advanced navigation tasks with built-in voice command capabilities and hands-free Bluetooth calling.

"The Magellan Maestro 4700 lets you keep your eyes on the road and hands on the wheel," said Mike Wagner, senior director of product marketing for Magellan. "We have incorporated voice command, Bluetooth, and highway lane assist to help you reach your destination with confidence. The large 4.7-inch screen is easily viewable in all lighting conditions. Thanks to our unique OneTouch favorites menu and our AAA partnership, the Magellan Maestro 4700 makes trip planning and traveling easier and less stressful."

The Magellan Maestro 4700 features several premium features including:

* Exclusive OneTouch(TM) Favorites Menu: Access favorite destinations and searches with personalized bookmarks. Reach your favorite cafe or restaurant in any city with a single touch. To meet consumer requests, the Magellan Maestro 4700 now offers an additional twelve bookmarks to save favorites.
* Bluetooth Compatible Hands-Free Calling: Make or receive calls using a compatible cell phone. Access your phone's address book to access up to 1000 numbers directly from your Magellan Maestro 4700. The noise-cancelling microphone keeps road noise down so you are heard clearly.
* Predictive Traffic: Analyzes past traffic patterns when creating a route to help you avoid known delays. Choose to stay on your current route or go with suggested less congested routes.
* Instant Access to All Points Of Interest (POI): Perform one search and get results from both the standard POI database and the Magellan-exclusive AAA TourBook(R) guide. Results are organized in a tabbed format.
* "Find Your Car" with Pedestrian Mode: Remembers the location of your car in parking lots, airports, malls, universities, amusement parks or stadiums. When your day is done the Magellan Maestro 4700 will automatically guide you to your car.
* 3D Landmarks: Displays visual cues to help drivers perform maneuvers and find destinations.
* Larger Fonts: Makes viewing easier and safer while driving.
* Intuitive, Context-Driven Touch Zones: Provides drivers with a completely interactive map screen.
* New Address Book: Makes adding an address a snap with smart address summary that lets users save complete itineraries.
* QuickSpell(R) with Smart City Search: Allows quick, single-address entry or convenient multi-destination trip planning, including route optimization.

The manufacturer's suggested price for the Magellan Maestro 4700 is $299.99. It ships with a windshield mount and cradle; 12-volt vehicle power adapter; USB cable, protective pouch, adhesive disk for alternative, on-dash mounting; and quick reference guide. For additional accessories, including cases, pouches, and other mounting options, visit www.MagellanGPS.com.

Map updates for Magellan products can be purchased separately.

About MiTAC Digital Corp.

MiTAC Digital Corp. is a wholly-owned subsidiary of MiTAC International Corporation and promotes and sells products and services under the Magellan brand name. Magellan assists people to travel, work and play their way with leading portable navigation and positioning solutions across multiple consumer markets. Recognized as an industry innovator, the company is the producer of the award-winning Magellan RoadMate(R), and MaestroTM series portable car navigation systems, as well as the Magellan Triton(R) outdoor handheld navigation devices. MiTAC Digital Corp. is headquartered in Santa Clara, Calif. For more information on Magellan, visit http://www.magellangps.com.

About AAA

As North America's largest motoring and leisure travel organization, AAA provides more than 51 million members with travel, insurance, financial and automotive-related services. Since its' founding in 1902, the not-for-profit, fully tax-paying AAA has been a leader and advocate for the safety and security of all travelers. AAA clubs can be visited on the Internet at www.AAA.com.

The Magellan logo, Magellan, RoadMate, QuickSpell, Triton are registered trademarks of MiTAC International Corporation and OneTouch, Maestro are trademarks of MiTAC International Corporation and are used under license by MiTAC Digital Corp. All rights reserved. The AAA TourBook, Roadside Assistance are trademarks of American Automobile Association. AAA(C) 2009 All rights reserved. All other trademarks and registrations are the property of their respective owners.

[Magellan]

The software, which we've already seen on BlackBerrys and other phones from both AT&T and Sprint, includes the usual car GPS features, like voice-guided turn-by-turn navigation with a 3D view, rerouting, and 10 millions business and interest points. And while it's $10 a month, it also has automatic map updates. The best feature for the iPhone, however, is that you can cancel your subscription at any time and resume whenever you want. This may be perfect for people who only need a GPS while going on trips outside their area. Others may want to do a one-time payment—for probably around $100—if Navigon comes to the US, or if TomTom selects the pay-once, no-map-update method.

According to the description, however, it only includes maps for the US, so no road trips around Europe for bon vivant-wannabes like me. [iTunes App Store; AT&T's Press Release]

It's cool because it uses open source maps that can be cached for offline use (unlike google maps), and uses the iPhone's accelerometer to augment and improve GPS accuracy. It also caches your max speed. My brother hit 46mph the other day, which is not so bad in slush. AND you can not only take geotagged photos from within the app, but you can mail yourself a Google Earth file with the tracks and the photos, or simply view them in Google Maps. It's a great app. The free version has all the functions of the paid $3 version, but you can't save more than one track. I have the paid one.

If you've got another GPS or phone platform, and can track your miles, I'll be collecting that data, too.
Just fwd your speed and mileage to the email snowmodo at gizmodo.com after we're done with the day. And no points for top speed. Be safe. Wear a helmet and all that. If you get hurt at our event it will ruin my day.
[Motion X GPS on iTunes: Paid, Free]

Snowmodo is our snow sport winter meet up at Lake Tahoe, California, with prizes, discounts, tons of fun snow activities, a party and GADGETS. If you can make it please RSVP and find out more info by clicking on the banner below. I'll let you wear my hat (below).

He continued following the steep path that the navigator told him was kosher, and totally where he wanted to be going. Suddenly, he hit a guardrail. Jones stopped immediately, so that his car was left hanging off the edge of a cliff. Jones said, "I just trusted the satnav. It kept insisting that the path was a road even as it was getting narrower and steeper. I rely on my satnav, I couldn't do without it for my job. I guess I'm lucky the car didn't slip all the way over the edge. But it has been a bit of a nightmare."

The ironic part? Police arrested Jones. They charged him with "driving without due care and attention," even though the real crime here, attempted murder, was clearly committed by the GPS. The lesson here is that you should at least occasionally look out the window when you're driving, if only because your GPS navigator might want you dead. [BBC, The Mirror via Jalopnik Image: Marcin Wichary/Flickr]

Old TomTom's had cellular data capabilities with very limited models, over bluetooth, through your cellular handset, but model support, but having this service built in, free for a year. The unit also records map data corrections, and in Wikipedia style. And I really have been liking TomTom's advanced lane guidance, which draws a pretty nice illustration of complicated turn offs.

This TomTom also uses "IQ Route" tech to measure arrival times, based on time of day and weekend vs weekday traffic patterns, gathered from users who dock and sync their navs with software. But, unlike Dash and Telenav Shotgun, it can't upload in real time, so you're not getting real time data for traffic jams from other users. (You get it from other providers.)

The device works on a GPRS network, leading me to believe its on AT&T, since they've been very into providing service for devices lately.

You can't really preview a GPS while sitting in a show room, but this seems like a decent device, given TomTom's move towards connectivity in it, and the hardware design is stellar, with a twist grip for the compact suction cup, and speaker grill in the back.

I would like the device to perhaps get some live uploading of traffic, but as we saw with Dash, that is a hard thing to master.

A journalist not drinking at a European press fair? Sacrilege. [GPS and Co via NaviGadget]

Then again, a major difference between the 910 and the 720 is storage (20GB HDD vs 2GB SD.) I'd rather have the slimmer, shock resistant 2GB, and spare me the storage for MP3s and maps to places I'll never go. Maybe the 720 is all I need. And since buy.com has a mount for the "720/920" it might have the same form factor (or at least mounting bracket.) But again, who knows what the 920 will ship with. [GPRReview.net]

[AVING]

It also has Bluetooth for phone functionality, including address book sync and speakerphone. (I assume when a call comes in, it shows callerID and pauses your music, but don't quote me on that.) It has an SD card slot and a lousy 64MB of internal storage. My bet is at $500, it's not a big HDD. There's a $400 version (NVM-4050), which loses auto-rerouting, traffic, photo and video playback and the FM transmitter. [easystreetnav via PRNewswire]

Now I've gotten my hands on that cheap-o Nuvi 200 and I have to say, testing them side by side, they gave nearly identical performances in terms of warning me of turns, locking onto satellites, and ease of use. It thankfully didn't have the neat, but flawed MSNDirect service, and MP3 player. One thing omitted that I missed? The text-to-speech ability for reading street names during nav. Still, I'm in love with how it does the basics.

Here it is: A sub-$500 navigator with a kick-ass UI and pathfinding performance. Highly recommended.
– Brian Lam
Garmin Nuvi 200 [Gizmodo]

Nokia says it will give you 3.5 hours of talk time and GSM and 2.5 in 3G, but can stay on standby for 11 days if you keep your mouth shut. Should be rolling out in Q2, but it won't be cheap—with all these features packed into one little handset, it will cost you just shy of $600 without a contract.

– Charlie White

Press Release [Nokia]

This one has a few tricks up its sleeves, though.
Most notably traffic monitoring, and finger gesture reading. Traffic is par for the course, but the finger gestures are something we''ve never seen before. Essentially, you can do things like draw an upsidedown V on the touchscreen to set the nav to bring you home. (Sony told us it was the shape of a teepee or roof, so it should be easy to remember.)

The screen is 3.5 inches diagonal, and it has 7.5 million points of interest across North America. Both decent stats.

The downside is that...

the traffic sensor is built into a likely bulky bracket, while Garmin manages to fit their traffic modules inside of its StreetPilot series monitor. And I require any GPS I use for driving to have text to voice for street name announcement, which this does not have.

It's a tight space, and I still think TomTom, Garmin and the soon to be released Dash are the best bets for the money. Final judgment reserved for the time when I get one in my hands. Or Charlie does another one of these awesome GPS vids. –Brian Lam

Sony NV-U71T [Sony]

GPS Gang Bang [Giz]

Let me spell it out for you: When you search for a gas station, it returns street directions, but also the pump prices. When you search for a movie theater, it returns movie times. Your maps never get out of date, and your points of interest database could be pulled from all the Google/Yahoo!/Yelp types of sites, giving you access to a practically unlimited number of...roadside Denny's.

And then there's traffic hive-mind thingy...(jump)

UPDATE: Whoops! Photo works now...thanks B.A. Kotaku.

Instead of merely reporting accidents and moving you away from them, the Dash comes with historical traffic data that goes hour by hour, per section of road. That means it knows that highway 80's average speed is about, oh, 20 miles per hour at 5pm going towards the bridge. And in the middle of the night, it should be 60.

But that doesn't account for one time delays like ballgame traffic and accidents. Say someone using a Dash is stuck in some traffic like that. The Dash GPSs uses its cellular data link to report slowdown to the Dash central server, which kicks down the fresh data to other users in the area. So your Dash is part of a traffic avoiding hive mind. Think about it&Mdash; Big cities are full of traffic, and early adopters, so this could really work.

Dash GPS's connectivity also makes it pretty easy to program. You can use the touchscreen. Or you can select an address on your PC, right click, and select "Send to Dash" to move it directly to your device. In the demo I saw, this took about 1 second. (Below)

Another thing that impressed me about Dash was how effectively it searches for stuff you need. Eric searched for propane, and the GPS hooked into Yahoo!, where it pulled back results for hardware stores, and other places that didn't actually have the word propane in the store's title. The web interface is tweakable, too.

One could setup Dash to update RSS feeds with geographic data, for things like apartments on craigslist, or dog parks.

The screens here are from a prototype device, so the UI has a long way to go before it starts shipping in early 2007. The hardware is a little thick around the middle, but that's ok considering this isn't meant to be a pocketable GPS, considering all that connect-licious wireless gear inside.

PS, Cory D. and the EFF Gangstas: These guys are insanely pre-cautious when it comes to privacy of location data, too. Pricing? Not yet.–Brian Lam

[Dash.net]