Stupid Magellan

Magellan can bite my shiny metal ass.

My dad's older Magellan eXplorist broke down, so my dad sent it in to Magellan to have it repaired. They said it couldn't be done, and wanted my dad to pay money for them to ship out a new one to him. After about five months of email and phone calls, they finally broke down and sent my dad a new gps unit for free. The thing is, they aren't making eXplorists anymore, so they sent my dad a new Triton 500. I'm fairly confident in saying that this product, though newer, is worse than the eXplorist. And the eXplorist was already a pretty bad unit. There are just so many terrible things with this unit, I'm surprised Magellan is still in business. When you hook it up to your computer you have to use Magellan's software to manage the files on your gps unit. The eXplorist would show up as a mass storage device, so you could transfer tracks, waypoints and other files quite easily just by using the file manager in your preferred operating system. With the Triton, they have decided to take out USB mass storage support, and force you to use their own shitty software, and believe me, it's terrible. The proprietary software that you have to use to manage your gps unit doesn't even come in the box, you have to download it from their website, and before you can download it, you have to sign up. You forget all hope of using the Triton in Linux. I've tried for several hours to get this thing to work in Linux, with no hope in sight. Hell, Magellan doesn't even have a USB vendor id listed in the Linux USB ID page, nor do they have one listed in the official USB-IF Company List. Naturally, the USB-IF wants me to pay $2000 to view the Integrators List. Seeing as how they're not on the first two lists, I'm beginning to wonder if they are certified to use USB at all. When you hook the Triton up to your computer (Linux or Windows) it can randomly crash. Yes, this product is that good. There are so many little braindead things about this unit, it makes me wonder if they did any testing on it. There are features listed on the main menu in the device that won't work, because Magellan is planning on enabling those features in a future firmware upgrade. Basically, this means they wanted to have a bullet point on the box, but didn't have the time to implement it.

I would encourage everyone I know to never purchase a Magellan product. I've used two of their products so far, and both turned out to be crap.