Review: Magellan Roadmate GPS for iPhone
Saturday, February 27, 2010 at 10:22AM
Updated on Saturday, February 27, 2010 at 11:01AM by
jcost
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A little late to the game, but a welcome addition to the iPhone is the Magellan Roadmate 2010 North America GPS app. Some of the features of the Magellan include spoken street names, highway lane assistance to let you know which lane to be in before a turn comes up, a pedestrian mode for taking it with you while walking, and iPod controls for changing your music without exiting the app, just to name a few.
Easy to Navigate
It's quick and easy to get going. Press MENU, Click ADDRESS, and then enter your specific address. Then keyboard entry is excellent and quickly predicts what you are trying to enter and provides a selection to choose from.
Once you have done that, you are presented with an overview screen which shows your routing preferences and a large GO button to begin.
Click on it, or you can click on a few of the objects to change various options, such as clicking on the CAR to switch to pedestrian mode. From this screen you can also choose to view the map or see the turn by turns listed in text, and if you don't like what you see, you can click the Routing Options and it will show you possible variations, such as Fastest Time, Shortest Distance, Most & Least use of highways. You can even do a trip simulation.
It's pretty straightforward and easy to use. You can navigate to intersections, contacts from your address book, and over 6 million points of interest.
You can use the map in horizontal or vertical orientation, which ever you prefer. It doesn't add any additional items to the heads up display so you aren't losing anything by choosing one over the other. It still shows the next turns, distance, speed, etc.
POI
The points of interest are done quite well, broken down into categories. If I want to get to a Gas Station, I click POI -> Gas Station and then it presents me with different companies, not just what stations are close to me; choose Show All, and it shows them in order of proximity. Since it's category based, if I prefer 'BP' I can choose it and it will show me all of the 'BP' stations close to me. The same is true for Restaurants and other POIs. It presents you with a list of categories and you can choose from there, instead of simply listing with proximity.
GPS, Navigation, iphone in apps, iphone 
