I recently purchased a Magellan Maestro 4250 to get to sales prospect’s offices for meetings and also to use it’s Bluetooth wireless speaker phone. The speaker phone is critical in New Jersey since we now have a draconian and very paternal law with $100 fines for using a cell phone while driving.

Without getting into every detail of the device I will tell you the good, the bad and the ugly and let you decide whether you want one or not.

The Good

The Maestro does and excellent job of guiding you from one location to another. It synchronizes with GPS satellites almost instantly and works well even inside a building that has notoriously bad reception of all other radio signals. I love that it chimes at the exact spot that you have to make a turn and warns you in advance verbally when you need to make an upcoming turn. The voice it uses is pleasant. It also understands voice commands and has an excellent user interface for entering destinations. You can start with a Zip Code, enter the first few letters of the street name, select the right one from a list and then enter the numerical address and you are on your way.

It has so many excellent features that it is impossible to describe them all without turning this into a user’s manual.

The Bad

Unfortunately, like all good things, there is a bad side to this GPS device–it sucks as a speaker phone. Please note the strong use of the word, “sucks!” The speaker is tiny. The volume is inaudible and the device never reconnects with your phone when you leave and reenter your vehicle. You have to go through the menus and find your phone and reconnect manually. This renders it completely unusable and makes it a gimmick rather than a feature. It is perplexing that the sound is such a problem since the sound for the street directions is crystal clear and adjustable. I read in on-line postings that this would probably be fixed in the next firmware. The current one is 2.24.

The Ugly

After reading that a firmware update would fix the problem, I searched the Magellan web site to find an update and could not find one. I then searched for a customer service number and called it. Their customer service sucks more than the speaker phone issue. Apparently, the customer service department is outsourced to a foreign country and the people there are complete idiots. The woman who spoke with me was more interested in getting information about who I was and where I was calling from than solving my problem. This little fact is particularly annoying since she did not use this information to call me back as she said she would at the end of the call. The support agent’s idea of customer service was looking up what I was asking about on the web site. I told her that I had already searched the web site and needed to know when a new firmware release would be forthcoming. All she could say is that one was coming, but that she did not know anything about the timeframe. I then asked her what the current version of the firmware was to see if I had the most recent and she could not answer this question. When pressed, she agreed to call me back with the information. It has been a week and no call back yet. This is pathetic and should not be called “customer service.”

I have some advice for consumer goods companies; bring customer service departments back to the United States and give them real information so that they can help customers. This is not the first time that I have experienced horrible support from off-shore call centers.

If you are interested in finding out more about the device, reading other reviews or buying it, go here.

Robert Alonso
Alonso Consulting