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| Magellan Maestro 4250 4.3-Inch Widescreen Bluetooth Portable GPS Navigator | 
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| Brand: Magellan
Category: CE
List Price: $599.99
Buy Refurbished: $129.99
You Save: $470.00 (78%)
New (26) Used (7) Refurbished (7)
Avg. Customer Rating:  314 reviews
Sales Rank: 756
Color: Silver/Black
Media: Electronics
Memorabilia: No
Tracks: Unknown
Batteries Included: No
Native Resolution: Unknown
Display Size: 4.3
Includes MP3 Player: 1
Clothing Size: 2GB
Size: 2GB
Shipping Weight (lbs): 4
Dimensions (in): 5.1 x 9.8 x 2.1
Legal Disclaimer: Warranty does not cover misuse of product.
MPN: Magellan Maestro 425
Model: Magellan Maestro 425
UPC: 063357118033
EAN: 0063357118033
ASIN: B000V4PZCI
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Customer Reviews:
 Nice product, terrible support for Bluetooth concern December 29, 2007
7 out of 7 found this review helpful
We purchased two 4250 units for Christmas despite the potential Bluetooth concern (silly us!) Indeed, we confirmed that one must re-pair the phone and GPS system each and every time one device or another is turned off. After reading a review, we thought that a software upgrade solution would be on the horizon to fix this glitch and therefore were not concerned. However, after multiple calls to Magellan tech support and no acknowledgement of the problem or confirmation that a software solution is imminent, we have decided to return the units. We might have considered waiting it out if the tech support had readily confirmed their knowledge of the issue (at first the technician tried to imply that loss of pairing was a normal occurence, but later conceded it was an aberration). The unit is excellent from a GPS perspective, but the Bluetooth was an important part of our decision to go with this unit. We are very disappointed to have to go through the return headache, but have realized that our concerns are not being adequately acknowledged or addressed. If Bluetooth is an important feature, we would not recommend the 4250. We probably will go with the Garmin nuvi 360 or 660 at this point.
 Better than my old Magellan December 29, 2007
6 out of 9 found this review helpful
I thought my old Magellan was great but this is even better. It is very lightweight and has a more versatile windshield mount. I enjoy most the new features such as bluetooth, AAA Tour book data, voice reponse and the fact that for each turn you are directed to take it names the street. The display is clear and bright. Just used it from CA to Seattle. It is great.
GPS Review December 28, 2007
2 out of 7 found this review helpful
I have been using this GPS for 2 weeks and have been very pleased with it. The directions have been good and when I make a chnage in directions because of knowing a different way, it has adjusted. I would recommend this to anyone. It is easy to use. the only problem I have found it that is shows my address as being a half block away - but then so does Googleearth as well as other internet directions.
 A solid choice, but not without flaws December 26, 2007
59 out of 60 found this review helpful
I bought the Magellan 4250 from Amazon for $357. I have previously owned a Magellan Roadmate 760, an HP rx5915 Travel Companion (TomTom) and three Garmin handhelds, one of which I have also used for auto navigation overseas (a Garmin GPSMap 60CSx). I have agonized about what new GPS to get for a couple of months now and have extensively investigated this one, the Garmin Nuvi 760, the Navigon 2100 and the new HP 300 series.
Design. The unit is attractive with both black and silver in the bezel and it's nice and thin... about the size of a Pocket PC device. The mounting bracket only adjusts two ways, but you can get that third degree of freedom by rotating the direction of the suction cup on the windshield so it works fine. I like this mount much more than the old flexible mounts on the Roadmate series. Those were horrid. They include a slip case for it, which is a cheap one, but nice of them to do anyway.
Startup. The unit doesn't always start up easily. It sometimes seems to 'stick' at the lawyer garbage screen even when I press the ok button. It usually starts just fine, but when it does stick, it still usually gets going after about a ten second pause. Occasionally, I have to turn it off and on again. I guess this is what we get with a Windows CE based device.
Satellite Lock. The first time I started the unit, I told it where I was in the config menu and it's been very quick to get a satellite lock on every startup. It's generally ready to go before I get out of my driveway and has been very reliable at maintaining a lock. It is much faster than the old Roadmate and faster than the rx5915 (which also has the SirfIII chip).
Maps. It's not Magellan's fault, but I'm quite irritated with Navteq for screwing up the maps around my home. About three years ago, I reported that their maps lacked my neighborhood street even though it's been here since 1985. They emailed back about six months later saying they had come by and added it to their database. What they didn't say is that they totally messed up what is where, putting streets in the middle of houses and shortening the overall street to less than half of its real length. What a mess! I've had to set my 'home' to a spot down the street that is still on the map. Other newish things in my area (such as a new major road that's only been open for a bit over a year) are in place, though, so you shouldn't give too much weight to whether my neighborhood is rendered poorly. Garmin uses the same company for their maps and TomTom uses a different company, Teleatlas.
Basic navigation. The 4250 seems to do a decent, though not perfect, job of navigating. I drove it to another city about a hour away today (on a route I'm familiar with) and it did make what I consider to be the 'right' choices. It had a couple of questionable calls that I'll have to keep an eye on. At one place, I took an exit to stop at a store and to continue my trip, it wanted to send me back onto the highway the wrong way for one exit instead of just telling me to do a U-turn and re-enter the highway. Another time, I pulled off the road for gas and, when it recalculated, it wanted me to cross the main road I'd been traveling down and go onto local roads (instead of turning left back onto the highway). My experience has been that all GPS devices do a certain amount of this stuff, but I was surprised by these two that seemed so far from reasonable by any standard. I'll have to keep an eye on it, though the rest of the navigation was quite smooth. A feature I haven't used yet is that, once a route is calculated, you can select a segment and exclude it. That's something the Garmin lacks that I really wanted so I'm glad to see it here.
Voice / Text-to-speech. The voice on this not great. It's an irritating woman's voice that tends to grate on the nerves. I turned the volume down and that helped a lot, but I don't understand why they don't give us a choice of voices like they did with the Roadmate. Why do companies remove features that don't cost anything (or much) to add to the new product once developed on the old one? The text-to-speech is a bit smoother than on the old Roadmate, but I'll still probably turn it off as I did before. It drives me crazy that the voice reads every single bit of a long line of alternate road names. They separate the different names with a / in the screen... why not just have it read to the first slash. It's totally ridiculous and irritating for it to keep repeating 'turn right on Bennett Road / US 29 Business / US 250 Bypass' over and over as you approach a turn. You can see the alternate names on the screen... how about just having it say 'turn right on Bennett Road'?
Traffic. I live in a rural area and don't use this. I'm saving my free activation for my next trip and so can't speak to how well it works.
Exit POIs. This is one of the features I think has a lot of potential. I haven't been able to test it yet, but was disappointed that it says in the manual that, if you do exit to a gas station using it, then it will cancel your current route. That seems silly since it can remember a set of waypoints in order for a trip, and it can detour around a traffic problem without losing your route. Still, that's a minor annoyance and I think the feature will be useful. I'll find out in about a week when I'll be traveling on Interstate highways.
Screen. The screen is sharp and clear and bright. I've read some people comment that they don't like the colors, but I do. I find them nicer than the colors on either the rx5915 or the Garmins Nuvis that I looked at. It automatically turns to night mode, which it nice, but the night colors are not as nice as those on the rx5915. The 4250 night colors are a black background with white roads, where the rx5915 night colors are a nice set of dark and light blues. Still, this is a very nice screen and is easy to read in every lighting condition I've hit yet. (Haven't had the sun directly on it yet.)
Trip Mode. One of the things I liked about the Garmin Nuvi 760 I considered was the ability to take a set of waypoints and optimize them for the shortest time to travel them all. So I was pleasantly surprised to find that the 4250 has the same feature. You just set up some waypoints in the trip editor and then tell it to optimize the trip. Very nice if you have half a dozen errands to run and want the GPSr to help you keep the trip as short as possible. That's about all I've done with trips, but it all seemed easy to do.
Voice Recognition. Forget about it; this is worthless. It's bad enough that the things you can tell it are extremely limited (and mostly not the things you'd really want), but it can't hear you over even regular road noise. I had to lean way forward toward the unit just to get it to respond to the 'Magellan' key word and it never did respond to most of the other commands I gave it. And if you did want to know something like the nearest ATM, you'd have to cancel your route before even asking as those options don't show up when a route is active. Just pretend this feature doesn't exist.
Bluetooth. This was disappointing in that it won't remember my phone (Razr v3) and reconnect. You'd think that pressing the 'connect' button in the phone menu would do it, but it doesn't. I have to go into my phone and have it search for new devices every time to get it connected. Now who wants to go through that? Even when connected, the speaker is marginal and it cannot access the phone's contact list so this is another worthless feature in my book. I'll stick to my bluetooth headset.
Address Book / Points of Interest. It's built-in points of interest are quite comprehensive, though it would be nice if they would let you combine a search by category and name. You must choose one or the other, which means you can't narrow it down by category first and then search by name. Still, it works and it does have pretty much everything I've ever asked it about. The address book works well and includes the option of storing up to three phone numbers, plus a note field, for each entry. If you use the bluetooth with your phone, it will dial those numbers if you wish. You can designate an entry as a 'favorite' to have your most used addresses in a shorter list. Custom POIs (now call 'enhanced') can only be saved using the included POI software and is one of the weaknesses of the Magellan. I can't express strongly enough the senselessness of not allowing GPS coordinates to be entered into the address book or of not allowing addresses to be entered into the custom POI file. To make my POIs, I have to use Google Earth to give me the GPS coords for a given address and then copy those into the POI Manager software. Given that every address in your address book is ultimately a GPS coordinate, it's absurd that you can't freely copy those back and forth. Add to it that you are limited to only ten categories of POI in your custom file and you just have to wonder what they were thinking. So overall, the address book is pretty good and custom POI handing is pretty marginal.
AAA Tourbook. I wasn't very excited about this when I chose the 4250, but after looking through it, I have changed my mind. It has a ton of great information about places you travel through. Instead of just finding the name of nearby hotels, it gives you quite a bit of information on each. You look up the hotels near you and it gives you the AAA stars, a description of it, amenities (so you can know if it has high speed Internet and such), whether it takes pets, and so forth. It does the same for food, events, entertainment, etc. I think this will be very useful.
Overall. I wasn't sure at first, but I am starting to think I'll keep this unit. Although I have pointed out several flaws in the product, the truth is that every brand has major flaws. Owners of the new Garmin Nuvi 7xx series complain that it locks too strongly to roads, putting you on roads that you're not on, and that it can take a long time to start up. They also have a variety of UI issues that are different than those that Magellan has, but just as irritating. There are also many things I like better about the Garmins.
The TomToms (if my TomTom-based rx5915 is any example) have a whole slew of usability issues (like not showing you the address for an entry in your address book and not showing addresses of POIs you searched for) and it has given me some amazingly creative routes that loop you out and around, going miles out of your way, when a simple right turn would have gotten you where you were going. But the TomTom also has some really nice features that the others lack.
So I am simply resigned that none of the companies can actually design a complete product and the act of choosing is just one of deciding which irritating things you can and cannot live with, and which unique features you'd really use. I do find myself wondering if the people who design these things ever actually use their own products. If so, I just don't see how they would make the decisions they do.
Anyway, I think overall, this unit will be pretty good, and even if the Garmin were to edge it out in operation (which I'm not sure it would), there is no way it would be enough better to justify the extra $150 or more that it costs. And this has several nice features the Garmin lacks. While I am a bit obsessive about my electronic gadgets and am quite hard to please, for 95% of the people out there, this would be a fantastic unit with lots of great features. The only caveat is that, since the voice recognition and bluetooth are virtually useless, I'd say that if one of their less expensive models lacks the voice recognition and bluetooth, but is otherwise identical, it would probably be the better bet. On an absolute scale of what I think a GPSr should be, I would have given this 3 stars, but compared to the other options out there, I feel 4 stars better represents its relative merits.
Poor unit at any price. Do not recommend. Returned it and got a Nuvi 650. December 26, 2007
5 out of 9 found this review helpful
Don't know what happened to my 1st review. I was going to update that review with new info. In a nutshell, my initial review went over how glitchy the unit was. I returned the 1st unit and exchanged it for an identical unit. Similar problems with the second unit. The power switch is a joke. Sometimes it turns on right away. Sometimes you have to hold the button down several seconds for it to turn on. Twice in a day it went to the setup screen at random. There was no way to exit the setup screen without rebooting the unit. The voice command given the level of accuracy makes it a gimmick, and not a feature. The bluetooth likewise was not consistent and did not work properly at times with the 2 phones I tested with it. It would do silly stuff like route the call to the handset rather than the speaker in the GPS. Yet other times it would route the call through the GPS speaker. Ok, lets say we don't need the voice and Bluetooth features. How does it do perform as a basic GPS unit? My experience was poor. While in the city it did an average job, I found that rerouting was not as quick as I expected at times. The graphics were only average at best. You can save a lot of money and get a plain wrap GPS that probably works better by skipping over the Maestro 4250. This week I took a trip through Lake Arrowhead and Big Bear Mountain. It performed terribly. During much of my trip though Big Bear it showed that I was driving though the middle of the lake instead of through the city. Through much of Lake Arrowhead it showed that I was off road despite being on major roads. It could not find its way from Arrowhead to Big Bear, about a 30 minute trip. It was constantly recalculating the route between Arrowhead and Big Bear to the point that the GPS was totally unusable during that portion of our trip. That was the final straw that made me return the unit. In its place I purchased a Garmin Nuvi 650 for $50 less than the Maestro 4250. The difference is like day and night. The Garmin so far had worked flawlessly. It is a pleasure to use versus dealing with the Maestro's poor software that makes it unreliable and a pain to use. The Garmin also has a built in MP3 player that I enjoy playing through my car's stereo. I strongly recommend the Garmin Nuvi 650 over the Magellan Maestro 4250. There are known problems with the 4250, some of which are alleged to be fixed with the new firmware for the 4250. Unfortunately, so far Magellan has failed to post on their web site the updated firmware that is rumored to fix some of the bluetooth problems. Save yourself a headache and avoid this unit. I am very tech savy and feel that they rushed this unit to market before it was properly tested. Compare the reviews of the Nuvi 650 and you will see that I am not alone in finding the 650 a much better unit.
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