Goodbye Magellan!!
When Z was in Le Grand-Saconnex, Switzerland, I headed there to see her, and figured it’d be a great time to get a GPS so we can use it for our road trips. The one I eventually picked was the Magellan eXplorist XL- it was a monster, but it had a big screen on it, and the reviews seemed favorable. I felt clever in that I used my change jar, and took it to the change-machine you find at many grocery stores. If you buy something from Amazon, they waive the transaction fee. Perfect! Things didn’t stay on the up-and-up for long with this thing…
I think things were fine for about a year, then the GPS started having issues reading the SD cards (any of them). This was a problem as all my maps are on it!. I limped along, and called Magellan to have it fixed as it was still under warranty. I got it back, and it had the exact same problem. If you’re wondering, it’s not me- I’m pretty technically savvy, and this GPS had a bad SD reader. I call back to deal with the tech support people from India, and returned it again. Same problem. In total, I did this 4 times, and it was costing me a fortune to keep shipping it back.This piece of shit costed me a hefty chunk of change, and this is the support I get?!? I was PISSED.
I won’t say who I talked to (someone high up), but after explaining my issue, and my disgust with their tech support, I was assured that I would get a new Triton model that was due to ship. That was delayed about 5 months, and every month, I’d write an email back asking for an update. Eventually, I got both a Triton 500, and a eXplorist 500 LE for free. I knew the LE model was destined for eBay, but I wanted to try the Triton out. First thing I noticed was how cheap it felt in my hand- even with the two AA batteries in it. Then as I poked around in the interface, I came to an error that said something like this:
Error in contacting satelite, please\n move to a new location, and try again.
Ok, for most people, they would see nothing wrong with this, but that “\n” there is a BIG boo-boo. What it is is a newline in unix (a metacharacter actually), and the fact that their QA is so bad that they didn’t catch this?? That’s BAD. Who is running the show there? If I can expect this sort of quality in a GPS, I’ll sell it on eBay too.
In total this is what I sold the GPS’s for:
- Old eXplorist XL: $150.00 + $18 shipping
- Triton 500: $197.50 + $14 shipping
- eXplorist 500LE: $100.50 + $14 shipping
Total: $461.00 ($494 - $33 in actual shipping costs for all the GPS’s via Yahoo!’s sweet shipping benefit)
Getting my money back (and then some I think) from the hassle of dealing with Magellan? Priceless.
Never again will I own another Magellan product. if you need a GPS, go with Garmin- at least you talk to someone here instead of someone that goes by the name “Harry” in India.