Magellan RoadMate 800 review

Included with the street-level maps is a database of more than 6 million POI, which are broken down into more than 35 categories, such as restaurants, vehicle services, airports, hospitals, and nightlife, just to name a few. You can locate a POI that is nearest to your current location, search for it by name, or conduct a city search and have the system automatically create a route to it. You can also create a route using a destination from your address book, which holds up to 200 entries.

Magellan's SmartDetour function kicks in when your travel speed drops below 15mph for a user-specified period of time, giving you the option of requesting a new route around the congested area. If you know ahead of time that a problem area is on your route, you can use the Detour function at any time to avoid potential slowdowns. New to this model is the addition of a 3D bird's-eye map view, which is activated by tapping an icon on the map. As with the Magellan StreetPilot 760, a detailed TrueView 3D map box opens right before an anticipated maneuver, showing the direction of your turn, the street name, and the distance to the turn. Oddly, the Magellan StreetPilot 800 doesn't offer the SayWhere text-to speech technology found on the 760, which is disappointing.

There is 4.5GB of available storage on the hard drive, so you can load lots of JPEG and BMP picture files and view them with the RoadMate photo viewer. You can also store MP3 and WMA music files and listen to them using the RoadMate music player or load them via the SD/MMC card slot. While the internal speaker is nice and loud, it's designed for voice commands and driving alerts. As a result, music sounds one-dimensional and tinny. You do get a decent set of earbud headphones, but we think an FM modulator, which allows you to play your music through your car stereo, would be a nice touch.

The Magellan RoadMate 800 performed admirably on our road tests, maintaining a strong satellite lock throughout most of our travels. Initially, it took 3 minutes for the unit to acquire a 3D fix (four satellites locked in), but waiting times were around 30 to 45 seconds thereafter, which is on a par with other navigation systems. More important, the RoadMate 800's receiver is steadfast, as it tracked our progress accurately on a route that took us from the suburbs of Long Island to Brooklyn. We lost our signal only once, and that was while we were stuck in traffic below an underpass.

The SmartDetour feature provided several escape routes when we encountered a massive traffic backup on the Brooklyn/Queens Expressway, but unfortunately, all of them were equally congested--not an uncommon occurrence around these parts. Driving directions were on the money, and the TrueView pop-ups made them very easy to follow. As advertised, the Magellan RoadMate 800's battery gave us close to 4 hours of unplugged power before requiring a recharge.