Magellan RoadMate 3055 4.7-Inch Widescreen Bluetooth Portable GPS Navigator with Lifetime Traffic

Compared to my Garnin Nuvi 255W ... Compared to my Nuvi 255W, there are good points and bad. I love one of the choices the for "Route Method" is "Mostly Freeways", I wish my Nuvi had that. Screen: Both are nice Magellan is bigger and bigger is better right? Bluetooth: The Magellan had no problem connecting to my Eris, thought it took several minutes and the screen did warn me it could take up to 5 minutes. It auto-connected after shutting off. When receiving a call, the map does disappear and you have to press a very small icon to get it back during the conversation. Voice Directions: Both are pretty accurate. However, the 3055 is very annoying. Traveling on a freeway with your exit coming up, it tells you 4 times and is very verbose in doing so. For example: "Exit California 14 North Palmdale, Lancaster on right in 2 miles", then 1.1 miles, the .5 miles, then at the exit. And each time it does the whole freeway description name. Good thing I don't drive too fast or I would be past my exit before it finished "California 14 North Palmdale, Lancaster." There needs to be a setting, so it only says the freeway name once. Setting and saving locations: Both pretty trivial. The 3550 will give you some more information e.g. Latitude, Longitude, distance from next intersection on the save screen.. Changing the route: E.g. going a different way. Sometimes you know better which way to go. The Garmin instantly recognizes this and says "recalculating" then gives you new directions. The Magellan actually took what seems like a quarter of a mile before it just gives you new directions. I don't know if that delay is intentional, hoping you will just correct yourself and I'm not sure which is better. The "recalculating" or silence. Traffic Assistance: My Nuvi doesn't have this, but it seems almost useless (to me) on the Magellan too. The traffic triangle's border changes color if there is something you should know. The you have to press it to see what is going on. Are you suppose to being doing this while driving? The you can select avoidance options. Also, one of the times the triangle was red, my wife pressed it and it gave us an incident that was well over 20 miles away even though it says incidents within 15 miles. I live in an area that is being built up all the time. So there are lots of roads not on "maps" yet. On both units when driving on these nonexistent roads, you are in open area just traveling. The Magellan had a small problem with this when my wife moved the map to search the surrounding area for roads. When she stopped, the 3550 could not "find" its way back. Only when we hit a road it knew about did it start tracking again. In summary, the 3550 has a lot of very useful features. The bluetooth is handy if you don't already have one. The big screen is easy to see. My only complaints are the traffic function should only be used by a passenger and the units chattiness needs to be dialed down a lot. Rating: 4 (Magellan RoadMate 3055 4.7-Inch Widescreen Bluetooth Portable GPS Navigator with Lifetime Traffic customer review by Howard W., 2010-09-07)

A Decent GPS The RoadMate 3055 is a decent GPS. The hardware is handsome, thin, and light weight. The software is showing its age and computer and car connection is just obtuse. Every manufacturer of GPS devices has an awful problem right now; there are too many models with too many features, too many price points, and absolutely no logic to model names or numbers. Magellan is just as bad as any other vendor. There are a few features to consider when buying a GPS. First is screen size, bigger screens are more expensive, but not necessarily better or easier to use (4 inches is a pretty common size, anything bigger just gets in the way). Second is Text to Speech, if you want road names read to you, and then get a unit with Text to Speech (the 3055 does Text to Speech). If you only want the GPS to say, turn left in 5 miles, turn left in point two miles, turn left now, ding dong; and then don't spend money on Text to Speech. I find it critical that the GPS say the road name. Third is Bluetooth, a way to connect your cell phone to the GPS and make hands free calls while driving. To me, this is a pretty worthless option, the speakers are never large enough and the noise cancelling is never good enough. Fourth is traffic subscription. Lifetime traffic is a nice thing, but you will have ads scrolling on your GPS, they aren't annoying, but they are there. Almost all the GPS get their traffic information from the same place. It is extremely unreliable (I have about 4 years of experience in a major metropolitan area and travel in many cities), the traffic jams area almost never there, or someplace not reported. I would frankly never pay extra for traffic information (see lower in the review for how poorly this unit performed). Fifth are map subscriptions. This is very sticky. Lifetime subscriptions typically cost around one hundred dollars and give you four updates per year. One map update costs around sixty or eighty dollars. Lifetime map update included with a GPS is not a bad plan, but almost no GPS offers this. Magellan is no different; lifetime subscriptions are around eighty dollars. Sixth is choosing between road assist or not to road assist. With road assist, whenever the GPS thinks an exit will be confusing, a representation of the road and signs appears on the screen. This is very useful in major cities on highways, totally useless on rural roads or small towns. I'm not sure this is worth extra money. Turned off, this is a very nice looking GPS. The border is gloss black plastic, fairly wide, and makes a great landing spot for your fingers while using the GPS. The back is nice looking silver. The unit is light weight. The pain starts after turning on the unit. Magellan has chosen to do nothing significant with computer connection. There is absolutely 100% NO Mac support, you have to have a Windows PC for any firmware or map updates. The first step I did with this unit was to update the firmware. You must install Magellan's Content Manager Software to do anything with this device and a computer. The software only moderately inhabits your computer, by default it runs at start up. It does everything magically, with little user intervention. The firmware update was painless, except that the software warns that this might take hours to complete (Magellan is horrible at predicting how long anything will take, from software updates to Bluetooth pairing), it only took ten minutes to download. The updating was painful to watch, the GPS goes through blue screen after blue screen reminiscent of the blue screens of death on a PC. Each screen had ultra cryptic words that mean nothing. Fortunately, the update completed without a problem. Virtually every single GPS on the market today (including the Mio's that nobody has purchased) allow you to transfer addresses from Google maps to the GPS. Magellan has chosen to not do this. This is a HUGE mistake by Magellan, the only way to enter an address is through their on screen interface or through your phone's address book (more on that abomination later). On a recent trip, I found the address on Google maps, verified with satellite images that it was indeed the correct address, transferred it through my MacBook Pro over to a Garmin Nuvi 765T GPS. On the Magellan, I spent endless time touch typing on the screen the city, the street name, and then the address number. I took off on my trip with both GPS's; the Garmin took me to the exact correct address. The Magellan took me to a place five miles up the road to a vacant corn field. Admittedly, this was a very difficult address to find, but with Google maps and Garmin, no problem getting there. Magellan couldn't find the location. The screen is resistive touch (meaning you have to press kind of hard on the screen to make it do anything, but you could use a stylus or gloves to touch the screen). If you are used to using an iPhone or iPod Touch, you will hate this type of screen. It requires much more deliberate forceful presses to make it do anything. The screen was fairly responsive, but not always. There are very few options to customize the noises this thing makes. I absolutely despise the snap click sound this device makes every single time you touch a virtual key on the screen. There is no way to change that sound or defeat it, short of muting the sound. Just after start up, the GPS makes a strange loud ohhh hoooo sound that also annoyed me. And instead of the voice saying turn now, when it is time to make a turn, the device makes another annoying ding dong sound (that can be changed to other more annoying sounds). The Text to Speech voice is a pleasant female voice that is not changeable. The voice is a little less robotic than Garmin's. The lane assist at first seemed really nice. Then I studied it carefully and compared it side by side to Garmin's version. Sadly, Magellan loses in this race. Instead of a replication of the real signs (color, relative size, and wording as Garmin has implemented it) Magellan has chosen to use green rectangles with highway numbers and comapss directions. This is pretty sad, these are generic rectangles and the highway numbering is accurate, but the words on the GPS never match the real road signs. In addition, Garmin has chosen to really represent the look of the highway with accurate lane count, and a big purple arrow that shows you were to go. Magellan, on the other hand, has chosen to do some very vague highway lines in green. It would be very easy to miss some complex exits with this particular system. The Magellan screen is fairly cluttered. They have added about an inch to the width of the screen compared to other four inch GPS's. The top and bottom of the 3055 screen is consistent with the other RoadMate models - very simple distance to destination, zoom buttons, Menu, distance to next turning point, and the "one touch" button. On the left traffic delays are displayed. On the right there are two icons, one for volume and the second for stuff along the route (gas stations, rest stops, etc.). There is enough room to see the map or routing. The default view of the road is zoomed in very tight, almost too tight really. The biggest crime Magellan has commited with this GPS is the whole mounting / charging arrangement. Included in the box is an awful simple suction cup mount. The GPS slides down a T slot into the holder. The supplied mini-USB to 12V adapter slides into a slot on the mount and provides power to the GPS. That adapter also houses the traffic antenna for traffic delay updates. This is cheap, crummy mount at its absolute worst. The charging arrangement is ridiculous. The GPS will take up to four hours to charge using the 12V adapter. The battery will last about two hours on a full charge. So this means a four hour car ride to get a full charge, because the "out of the box" experience is only with the 12V adapter. The manual does mention an optional AC adapter. After doing a bit of testing, the GPS requires fairly high wattage to charge. Any mini-USB cable will work to connect this GPS to an AC adapter or a computer. An iPhone charger will not work. An iPad charger and most USB ports on a computer do work to charge this. The biggest problem, it is impossible to figure out if the unit is charging, there is no light on the unit to show charging status. The battery level indicator on the unit is pretty worthless, I could not understand if the battery was dead or fully charged. The next crime is synchronization with a cell phone. The iPhone is supported by this device. The instructions clearly state that your address book can be imported into the GPS. It also warns that it might take up to five minutes to pair via Bluetooth. In about a minute my iPhone 4 was connected to the GPS. I then responded yes to importing the phone book. About a minute or two later, all my contacts were imported. I was overjoyed; this was easy and seemed to work out great. I have the most basic contact list in the universe, maybe 150 contacts all entered via Outlook and using standard fields for the data. The darn GPS made 375 out of them, put them in random order, created a huge number of no title entries, duplicated a bunch of contacts, and then never got an address right so I could navigate to that address. That was about the most useless piece of garbage import I have ever met. On a recent trip I pitted my Nuvi against the 3055, side by side navigation in the car. When I deviated from the planned route, the Nuvi spoke up with "recalculating" (that does get a annoying after a while) while the Magellan just redid the routing and never said a word (good job Magellan). Both units called out exits and turns equally well - Magellan a bit earlier than Garmin. Both pronounced or mispronounced words equally well. Magellan was very pessimistic about arrival time and updated often during the trip. Garmin was optimistic about arrival time and did very little updating. Oddly, Garmin was spot on exactly correct. If the real arrival time is noon; Magellan initially reports noon ten (pessimistic) and Garmin may report eleven fifty eight (optimistic). Magellan had a lot of trouble with traffic reports. The antenna kept losing connection and it kept reporting small amounts of delay time that didn't exist. Garmin never had trouble with antenna disconnects and accurately reported no delay during this trip. The Magellan maps are angular, not exactly very pretty. Turns have a lot of flat angles on them, they are not smooth arcs. The Magellan sticks to one zoom level and never automatically changes. This is not very helpful around exit ramps or intersections. It would be nice if you could see the ramp detail a bit better by automatically zooming closer to the detail. It's very hard to recommend this GPS. The software is old, the maps are choppy looking, the charging arrangement is not very well laid out, the noises it makes are annoying to me, phone book import is badly broken, and computer connectivity is virtually non-existent. This GPS is not very expensive and does have features standard on much more expensive units. It just feels like this is the same software found on Neverlost more than five years ago, it is getting very long in the tooth. Rating: 3 (Magellan RoadMate 3055 4.7-Inch Widescreen Bluetooth Portable GPS Navigator with Lifetime Traffic customer review by Daniel G. Lebryk, 2010-08-30)

Here's the "Strait" on this Magellan I am an owner of several GPS units. I have an old Garmin Street Pilot C330. I also have a newer Garmin nuvi 765T and a TomTom 540TM. Overall, I can say that while the Magellan Roadmate 3055 is not bad, its not in the same class as any of the other GPS units I'e used. What in the box? * The Roadmate 3055 GPS * Windshield suction mount * 12V adapter * USB connector * Instruction guide What is notably missing from the box is an AC adapter. This means there are only two ways to charge the battery. One is to be in the car and plug it in with the included 12v "cigarette lighter" adapter. The other was is to buy an optional AC adapter. The unit cannot be charged via the included USB cable. For every GPS I've owned, the unit has included an AC adapter or can charge via USB. Not so with this Magellan. As far as performance, I find the unit fairly easy to use. I do not feel the interface is quite as intuitive as the Garmin or TomTom, and some features require multiple keystrokes. This is ironic since the unit includes a "One Touch" option. The One Touch feature allows you to assign keys to favorite places or address book entries. But still, certain basic things are missing. As an example, when you are in map mode, you have to press a few keys to display a list of upcoming turns/directions. On a Garmin or TomTom this is a simple matter of pressing one key. Another place I think the Magellan lags behind is in how it announces turns. While it does read you advance warning of upcoming turns/directions, when it is time to turn instead of a voice telling you "Turn right onto Main Street", or even "Turn right", the Magellan beeps. You can change the beep to a chirp, but much the same. The beeps for left and right turns are different beeps, but when you are driving and following directions, a beep is not quite the same as a voice telling you where you are turning. I also ran into an issue in the use of the unit's blue tooth. In all fairness, neither my older Garmin or my new TomTom have blue tooth. The Garmin 765 does, and it works easily and flawlessly. The Magellan's bluetooth is buggy, at best. I tried pairing it with several phones. It kept saying it was paired, but would not connect to the phones. I tried this with a Motorola RAZR, as well as a Pantech Pursuit, a Pantech Link, and a Blackberry Bold. As far as this device in and by itself I don't want you to think I hate the product. It has several pros.....it has a nice large display. It has a couple of nice features too - it reads the letters as you type them, which is nice if you are typing without reading the screen on each press of the key. Also, the aforementioned 'OneTouch' feature is pretty nice for customizing favorites. Another nice feature on the Roadmate is the voice commands, which allow you to invoke simple commands using your voice. An example would be saying "Go home" to start a trip home. The unit provides very timely information, giving you notice of upcoming turns well in advance, perhaps even a tad earlier than the TomTom and on par with a Garmin, albeit followed up with the "beep" instead of "Turn right" when its time to turn. Maps are clearly displayed and accurate. The highway assist feature works nicely, although not as realistic as the Garmin and TomTom, both of which display lanes in "black top" view. The Roadmate has free lifetime traffic service which is subscription free and void of annoying pop-up advertisements. It also includes a AAA Tour Guide which is like an online version of AAA's travel guides, complete with ratings on hotels, restaurants, etc. So, for basic, no frills navigation in a situation where you are lost, the Roadmate 3055 is great. As a full-featured GPS, it is OK, yet compared to the other units I own, the Roadmate is somewhat of a disappointment. I would say there are better products to be had in the same price range. Rating: 3 (Magellan RoadMate 3055 4.7-Inch Widescreen Bluetooth Portable GPS Navigator with Lifetime Traffic customer review by B. Colonna, 2010-08-29)

Best GPS Yet This is the first GPS I have used that is not a Garmin so I was somewhat apprehensive since Magellan does not seem to get the level of hype that is directed at Garmin. It has been a most pleasant surprise. First off, the screen is large enough to be easily read. The brightness is of an excellent level and makes for outstanding visibility. Entering an address for routing purposes is a simple task. My first adventure was a test run to experience the instruction giver's voice and attitude. That person turned out to be a no nonsense woman with a somewhat stern demeanor. I wanted to check out her reaction to a deliberate drift from the suggested route. With Garmin, the woman offers corrections with a tone of abject disgust at one's stupidity. It was, therefore, with trepidation that I made a wrong turn albeit with the fear that the Magellan woman would give me a butt kicking. She reacted quite quickly and professionally but did not change her tone or try to demean me as she gave me new instructions. I made several more deviations and each time she quickly provided new instructions without any implied criticism. I am very pleased with this GPS and look forward to a lengthy relationship with the civil instruction giver. Rating: 5 (Magellan RoadMate 3055 4.7-Inch Widescreen Bluetooth Portable GPS Navigator with Lifetime Traffic customer review by Duffer., 2010-08-28)

Roadmate 3055 Only had for a month or so and love it Very easy to use and the 4.7" screen is good for data entry. Once you begin your trip, there is almost no need to look at the screen as it will talk you through the trip with plenty of warning before your next turns. The bluetooth feature is nice for hands-free use of your cell. Speaker is more than ample. I would recommend the 3055 as a very good entry level unit. It has enough bells and whistles for me. After all, the purpose is to get you from point a to point b...and it does that just fine. h Rating: 5 (Magellan RoadMate 3055 4.7-Inch Widescreen Bluetooth Portable GPS Navigator with Lifetime Traffic customer review by h in nj, 2010-08-24)