Magellan RoadMate 4.3 Inch Widescreen Portable GPS Navigator with
- Battery Life – Estimated (Hrs) 2 Hours
- Bluetooth – None
- Cartography – Preloaded Yes
- Junction View – None
- Lane Assist – Yes
Magellan RoadMate 2136TLM-4.3 Inch Widescreen Portable GPS Navigator with Lifetime Maps and Traffic
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Frank
September 25, 2013Good GPS that is just a little ponderous,
I am generally very happy with the Roadmate 2136t-LM.
The screen is large and organised well, the speaker is loud and it comes with everything you need. You get a large 4″ screen, a suction cup holder, charger and traffic receiver. The suction cup works flawlessly even in thight places.
The directions are clear and with the spoken full street names you have a hard time to get it wrong. If all fails, you can always check the map view for the right route. This unit tells you where to turn (street name, number, direction) approximately 3 times. 2, 1 and about .6 miles away. The actual turn is then signaled with a distinctive bingbing with was so far 95% on time and on the spot. Although new to me, I liked that.
The traffic receiver works, the detours on traffic too, but in our area there is clearly more traffic issues than reported, so it renders it a little useless.
Big plus is also the lifetime free map and POI update and, for AAA members, the additional year of warranty. All that together gives you all you need and makes it a perfect low cost GPS ($60 to $100), well almost perfect. Of course you can not expect wonders in this price reagion, and more expensive devices come with additional features, but still the RoadMate is feature rich, so it is very sad that it is too slow, to be perfect. It does its job very well, once a destination is set. But getting there takes more patience than necessary, even in the low cost segment. In my opinion, this does not make it useless, but limits it to leisurly use. People who use a GPS for frequently setting destinations or changing them often, will be dissapointed quickly. As an example, as you enter the city name letter by letter, the device filters out non matching entries, and especially on the first letter it can take a minute until it is done with it.
Again, apart from that, my summary is, that this is a very good device with a surprising feature richness for the price.
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|Vincent V
September 25, 2013DO NOT update your software,
Notice how half the reviews rave about how nice this little GPS is whereas the other half says it utter garbage. Whether it’s good or not, depends upon whether you’ve updated to the latest software or not. The 2136t-lm, when I first go it, was a snappy little device. It locked onto the satellites pretty quick (never more than 30 seconds, usually within 10 seconds). Life was good.
Then I decided to update the software (version 4.85 was preloaded) and map. Big mistake. The latest version, 4.93, slowed the device to an agonizing crawl. It takes at least 5 seconds to respond to ANYTHING. Adding a new address would take nearly 30 minutes. Gagh! Recalculating routes takes 5 seconds, in which case it would have to reroute again. All the 1 star reveiw, I’d bet my bottom dollar that they all updated to the latest software.
Fortunately for me, I managed to downgrade back to the original 4.85. Old habit of backing up before any upgrading saved the day.
I got this mainly for the traffic feature. It’s different than what I’d expected. I was hoping it would be like how Google Map on the computer shows color coded traffic flow. It doesn’t. You get an colored icon and the estimated delay along the route. Digging a little deeper into the traffic, it gives you an idea where the congestion is located and the type.
Overall, a nice GPS. Just don’t update the software. I’ve been having difficulty updating the map. The USB 1.1 takes forever to transfer the map. Something caused me to lose connectivity to the device every time. I’m going to different ports and cables and possibly a different computer to get the updated map.
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