Magellan Maestro 4370

It's been a little while since we've seen anything from Magellan, but in late October, the company revealed its latest in-car GPS, the Magellan Maestro 4370. A step-up model from the Magellan Maestro 4250, the portable navigation device (PND) offers a new user interface with a feature called OneTouch that gives you quick one-click access to your preferred destinations. It's real time-saver for navigating to frequently visited locations or finding favorite businesses in new territory since you don't have to go through various menus. The Maestro 4370 also delivers with accurate directions and advanced navigation features, such as text-to-speech functionality, integrated Bluetooth, and lane guidance. While there are a couple of performance issues, the Maestro 4370 provided accurate directions and is a good PND for those looking for a higher-end system. The Magellan Maestro 4370 is available now for $399.99.

Design
With a sleek lacquered black chassis and vibrant display, the Magellan Maestro 4370 is certainly an eye-catching device. The clean, streamlined design will make a nice addition to any car interior. It's also fairly compact at 4.6 inches wide by 3.2 inches high by 0.7 inch deep and weighs 7.3 ounces, and unlike many GPS devices, it comes with a protective case so you can pack for a trip without fear of scratching the screen or outer shell and then use it in a rental car.

The real attraction of the Maestro 4370 is the 4.3-inch touch screen. With a 480-by-800-pixel resolution, maps, text, and images look amazingly sharp and smooth. You can adjust the backlighting, but you don't get the option to choose from various map colors, aside from the standard, day, night, or automatic modes. The onscreen keyboard is fairly spacious and in QWERTY format, so we found entering addresses pretty easy. However, we found that the system is a bit sluggish so sometimes we had to retap icons and back out of menus, or the map screen often brought up a rotating clock or "Please wait" message.

The user interface has been slightly revamped since the Maestro 4200 series. Of course, the main difference is the new OneTouch menu. Basically, the feature lets you preselect your favorite businesses (restaurants, banks, gas stations, and so forth) and addresses and presents them on a single page where you can just tap on the appropriate icon to navigate to the destination from your current location. There's no need to go through several menus or manually enter addresses since they're all in one place. Unfortunately, unlike we originally thought, you can't assign OneTouch functions to multimedia or Bluetooth, though Magellan plans to add this capability to future OneTouch devices.

The OneTouch screen can be accessed by touching the tab in the upper right-hand corner of the screen; you can also hide it by tapping the tab again. The process of assigning OneTouch keys is easy if you're simply entering an address, but if you want to add a certain point of interest (POI) or save searches, it gets a bit more involved. For example, you have to go to the POI database, select a category or subcategory/specific business, save, and then select a OneTouch button. It's not particularly complicated but we recommend checking out the user's guide to get the hang of the process. Overall, we found the feature to be useful. Having all our favorite locations in an easily accessible pull-down menu was convenient and a quite a time-saver.

On the right side, you will find an FM antenna input, a mini USB port, and a SD/MMC card expansion slot for side loading multimedia. There's a power button on top, while the speaker is located on the back.

The Magellan Maestro 4370 comes packaged with a car charger, an AC adapter, a USB cable, a protective pouch, a vehicle mount (windshield and dash), and reference material. The car mount requires a bit of assembly, but it's really easy. More importantly, it did a good job of securely holding the unit in place during our test drives.

Features
In addition to the new OneTouch interface, the Magellan Maestro 4370 offers plenty of other navigation features. The GPS comes preloaded with maps of the United States, Canada, and Puerto Rico and 6 million points of interest. The trip planning process is like most other PNDs; you can enter a specific address, choose a previously entered destination, select a location from your address book or a POI, and more. Of course, you can also choose any favorite that you've saved on the OneTouch menu.

You can customize the way the system creates routes. From the Settings menu, you have the option to choose which road types you want to use on your journey (highways, toll roads, carpool, etc.) and whether you want calculations by fastest time, shortest distance, simplest route, or the most economical. Traffic can also be factored into route creation, since the included car charger has an integrated RDS/TMC receiver. The real-time traffic updates are supplied by Navteq Traffic and displays the color-coded road conditions on the map and lists any traffic incidents along your route. If you're already on the road and encounter traffic, the Maestro 4370 can provide an alternate route if you so choose via the SmartDetour Feature. With the purchase of the GPS, you get a three-month complimentary subscription to the traffic service; afterwards, you'll have to pay $39.99 per year. The Maestro 4370 offers routing options for the car, taxi, bus, emergency vehicle, bicycle, and for the first time, pedestrian mode.

Other navigation functions include automatic route recalculation, a detour function, and multidestination trips. The POI database contains all the major categories (accommodation, airport, gas stations, and restaurants) and more specialized interests, such as wineries and race tracks. You can search for restaurants by cuisine type, but in addition, Magellan includes separate listings for popular chain establishments like Dunkin' Donuts, Outback Steakhouse, and Jamba Juice.