Magellan Roadmate 1200 Review

The name of Magellan has been associated with GPS since the US Department of Defense first launched their military satellites in 1978.

The Magellan Roadmate 1200 is a fairly basic entry level sat nav, what you get in the box is just the unit, the windscreen mount and a 12-24 volt cigarette lighter style power adapter. The internal rechargeable batteries are advertised as having only 2 hours of continuous use but you may purchase an AC adapter as a separate accessory.

Maps are preloaded for seven regional European areas including UK and Ireland and searching for destinations and points of interest is made easier with QuickSpell™, an exclusive auto-complete feature making it easy to enter destinations regardless of spelling prowess.

The 3.5 inch display shows interactive POI icons - simply touch the icon to see the name, address, telephone number and directions to get an instant route. With hundreds of thousands (1.3 million on the US version) of points of interest in the database, it would be hard to miss something important.

In general the menu is simple and quick to use and the spoken directions are clear and concise. Although the unit gives you audible turn-by-turn directions, it is does not support the SayWhere TTS (text to speech) feature provided in other Magellan models. A rather nice feature is that it precedes its voice directions with a chime - you can turn this off or change the sound if you like, but sometimes it is to real advantage to mentally be brought back to your route before you need to make a turn - better that than getting last minute directions you were not expecting - "Say What?".

The layout on the screen, although viewable from wide angles, was cluttered and not too clear to understand. The display itself is nice and bright though, and for easy night viewing it automatically adjusts the colour and contrast.

Like most of the competition, the Magellan Roadmate 1200 uses the SiRF star III chipset providing state of the art GPS position acquisition. If you end up with a North American unit secondhand, it may well have the alternative Centrality Atlas II chipset. The other software, however, needs to catch up with itself - positioning and repositioning are fairly slow and it is frustrating to be told to turn at a road you just passed.

This is a sleek and compact unit and weighs only 140 grams - easy to carry along in a pocket and hardly larger than a pack of cards, but as walking and cycling modes are not included in the software, the benefits of its small size are not optimized.

For the money you will pay for the unit it really is a steal of a deal. It does not have fancy features but it never advertised itself as a catch-all product. However, if you can stretch an extra £30 the TomTom ONE or Mio C220 are just a better product.