So I’ve been tooling around town for a couple of weeks now with the Magellan RoadMate 1470, and even taken it on a few road trips out of town. I’ve taken it along to places I go frequently, playing around with options such as “mostly freeways” and “fastest time” in order to see how its routing compared to what I already new to be the shortest or fastest route. I’ve also taken it along to places I’ve never been before, to see if it could indeed get me where I needed to go with the purported ease promised by its maker. I’m happy to report that the new 1470 lives up to its advanced billing.

If you’re looking for a mid-range sat nav for your car that has some bells and whistles but is still strictly a capable navigator without purporting to be anything else, you’d do well to consider the Magellan RoadMate 1470. This device debuted along with several other new RoadMate models this spring, the RoadMate series being Magellan’s mid-range set of portable navigation devices (PNDs) with Maestro being its high-end group. The 1470 was the de-facto flagship of the RoadMate sat navs, at least briefly, until the 1475T, which features Magellan’s free traffic service,  debuted earlier this month. The advent of the 1470 and its sister models, the 1440 and 1340, was and still is notable in that it saw Magellan bring its OneTouch technology to its midrange devices.

In case you haven’t had your coffee yet, or it’s after 5 p.m. where you are and your frontal lobe has shut down for the day, OneTouch is Magellan’s name for its touchscreen technology, which was previously only available on certain Maestro models. So that’s where I’ll begin my review.

I Want a GPS with An Easy Touch

Touchscreen technology has come a long way in the last few years, driven in large part by mobile phones and PNDs, at least as far as consumer tech is concerned. For the most part I found the screen on the 1470 to be just sensitive enough — but not too much — that it required nothing more than a single fingernail tap on the related icon to launch a command. Magellan’s OneTouch menu is also, er, a nice touch — sorry, can’t resist a pun, good or groan worthy. With one tap you can navigate to a number of commonly used services or menu options, as well as customize it to list frequent destinations — specific places, such as home or Lookout Joe locations (a local coffee chain where I live) — or more general point of interest (POI) searches, such as “coffee” or “pizza.” It already has options for gas and ATMs in place.

So, with just two taps, one on the OneTouch icon present in the upper right hand corner of the 1470’s bright, 4.7-inch screen, and one more on the relevant icon, you can be on your way home or off to the nearest coffee joint. You can save up to nine POIs or searches on the OneTouch menu — nine seems kind of an arbitrary number, but I imagine there must be some hardware or software coding reason for it. Another not-so-obvious feature is if you tap in the lower left corner, you can scroll the display between your current speed, estimated time of arrival, the estimated time remaining for your trip, or your current direction of travel.

The only problem with the 1470’s touchscreen is the problem with every touchscreen: they are crud magnets. But it’s not Magellan’s fault if you just had to have a cruller with your coffee, and now you’ve got sticky fingers.

The 1470’s POI list also appears pretty extensive — it boasts AAA TourBook listing among them — I was able to find my local indie coffee shop, for example, and several other small, local establishments here in my hometown all listed in the 1470, in addition to the usual chain stores and whatnot. This device’s onboard software works well with the touchscreen as well, particularly the QuickSpell and SmartCity Search, which narrows searches and checks spelling when entering addresses, according to Magellan. This appears to be location sensitive, too, which would make sense, after all. Once I input my home city, Cincinnati, from then on when I would manually put in an address, as soon as I got to the city portion and hit the letter C on the on-screen keyboard, its predictive text function would pop up Cincinnati immediately, except when I was testing it in Columbus, Ohio; then “Columbus” would pop up. Street names are also dependent on your location; it narrows the number of possible street names with each letter input until it can give you a list to choose from.

This actually took awhile to get used to, though, as I would catch myself typing in C, then I, etc., not paying attention to the predictive text, and the 1470 would assume I wanted to go to Circleville, since I had already passed up its offer of Cincinnati right off the bat. The 1470 is almost too intuitive, in this case, but it sure does save you a lot of tapping on the virtual keyboard. A note on the drop-down keyboard; it’s a standard ABC layout, not QWERTY, which I would prefer, but then I type for a living. I imagine most users are fine with the ABC keyboard, still, it would be nice to have the QWERTY as well as the ABC layout as an option.

But I did find the RoadMate 1470’s software to be pretty user friendly. Magellan says you can use it right out of the box, which is what I did, literally, taking it on a 100-mile trip to a specific destination in the heart of the aforementioned downtown Columbus. Again, it’s fairly straightforward and intuitive to use — PNDs in general have come a long way in the past decade, in this regard. In fact, Magellan doesn’t bother with any PCs oftware for the 1470 beyond providing a CD that helps you either hook up to Magellan’s website to check for map updates or to backup your data. All the trip planning and everything you may want to do is done on the unit itself.

At first, when I realized this, I was thinking “Yuck, I don’t want to have to do trip planning on that small screen with a virtual keyboard.” But the predictive text/Quick Spell feature makes it pretty pain free. In fact, it’s kind of nice not to have to mess with hooking it up to a PC, but rather being able to trip plan on the fly directly on the unit.

One thing that I did find a little confusing was the multiple destination option; here again, I think the 1470’s interface is a little too intuitive for its own good. You can plan a trip or just input multiple destinations, and even drag a finger and change the order in which you want to reach your various stops. When you add a second destination while you are already navigating to your first destination, however, the 1470 will offer various prompts, asking if you want to go to this second destination first, or skip the original destination altogether. If you’re not paying attention, you can goof this up and head off in the wrong direction, or possibly to the wrong destination altogether.

The good thing is, this is easily remedied; just go to the OneTouch menu and look up previous destinations, and with one more touch you can pick said destination, tap “Go” and off you go.

But Can it Navigate?

Which brings us to the big question: how is the navigation? In two words, just fine. Commercial, consumer GPS receivers and the devices they go into have gotten fairly standardized in recent years, and I found the 1470 to perform very well in this regard. It got a satellite signal lock and nailed my position in about two minutes on average for a cold start; warm starts –getting a lock after turning the ignition off (the 1470 gives you the option to power itself down or operate on battery power) then back on a short time later — took about 30 seconds or less. The 1470 also had no problem maintaining a lock while maneuvering in urban canyons or on wooded, hilly back roads.

Sometimes, in an urban setting, when pulling out of a parking garage for example, the 1470’s position would be a little off, but this usually resolved itself within a couple of blocks. But this will happen with any receiver, and generally the 1470 was always spot on. Even after all this time, I still think it’s cool when a GPS unit can track my car with accuracy to the point that it knows when I’m pulling onto an on ramp, or into the alley behind my house.

Which brings me to some of the more fancy features that come with the 1470, namely its lane assistant technology, which is well implemented. When on the highway the 1470 will verbally alert you when an interchange is coming that you need to take (or not take, even, when you approach a place where you could ostensibly screw up and end up in BFE), and will display highway signs with corresponding lane arrows  indicating where you need to be — the lane(s) you need to be in will be highlighted with a bright green highway sign; the lane(s) you want to avoid will be noted with a dim highway sign — pretty straightforward. As you approach the interchange, the 1470’s map automatically zooms in and provides more verbal alerts, chimes, and a big fat arrow indicating your direction (bear left, right) etc. The same thing happens when you’re on a regular two-lane road and approaching an intersection where you need to make a turn.

The verbal alerts and spoken street names are a must have these days as far as I’m concerned; you don’t have to take your eyes off the road if you’re in busy traffic with this feature. When people ask what features they should look for, spoken street names is a biggie I always recommend. Other than improved location accuracy, this is the single best improvement in PNDs since these things started showing up on the market a decade or so ago, and I’m happy it’s becoming standard.

But back to the navigation performance. I took the 1470 along on several trips to destinations that I go to frequently — the gym, a sandwich shop in the next neighborhood over, places like that — to see if its routing matched the routes I normally take. Only in one instance did my own judgment vary from that of the 1470; it seems to think that the direct route to gym, rather than taking the freeway, is the quickest way to get there and it’s most assuredly not — I’ve timed both ways more than once. Unless you’re going from my house to the gym at say, 3 a.m. on a Tuesday, the highway is almost always quicker — albeit a few miles longer — because you avoid many, many traffic lights and lots of local traffic (I live near a large, public university and four hospitals).

But I should also note that I’m the kind of person that absolutely hates sitting in traffic. I’ll drive 20 minutes out of my way to avoid sitting in bumper-to-bumper traffic for 10. I also, like old Bobby Frost, have a penchant for the road less traveled. If you’re the same, be aware that the 1470 offers several different navigation options: “fastest time,” “shortest distance,” “mostly freeways” and “least use of freeways.” It will also give an estimated time of arrival so you can determine if you have time to dillydally and take those back roads home suggested by the least-use-of-freeways option. Incidentally, if I told the 1470 I wanted to go the gym using mostly freeways, it chose my preferred route.

But generally the 1470 and I agreed on how to get around my home town, so I’d happily trust its routing in some place I wasn’t familiar with. In fact, I noticed that it skipped one shortcut I generally take when returning home from a certain direction, opting instead for a slightly longer route — a matter of a quarter mile extra, at most. But my short cut involves cutting across two lanes of traffic and making an immediate left turn; it’s a bit of a banzai move and not for the feint of heart in heavy traffic.  If I were giving directions to someone from out of town, I’d send them on the slightly longer route as well, so I can’t fault it for that.

The RoadMate 1470’s automatic rerouting function also works well if you deviate from your appointed path, either accidentally or on purpose. Occasionally it will politely suggest, in its digitized feminine voice, that “if legal to do so, make a u-turn  as soon as possible” (in the navigation options menu you can instruct it not to suggest this, if u-turns are always illegal in your town), but usually it will just determine a new route and point out your next turn at the appropriate time.

So What’s Not to Like?

Was there anything I actually didn’t like, besides the interface being a little too clever? Two things: muting the sound and placement of the USB port. These are very nitpicky things, but still, I think they bear mentioning, if for no other reason than hopefully product designers will see this and remember it going forward. But let me emphasize, they certainly are not deal-breakers by any means; I can still heartily recommend the 1470.

Now granted, the sound is easily adjustable via the speaker icon on the 1470’s touchscreen; it only takes two taps to mute it completely, and unmuting it just takes just a single tap on the icon. Still, I’d like to be able to toggle mute with a single tap as well. Told you I was getting nitpicky.

As for the USB port, which also serves as the power cord port, it is located on the bottom of the unit right next to where one of the cradle arms are located when the device is sitting in it attached to the windshield or dash. This is a bona fide gripe, as it makes it impossible to put the unit into the cradle — which works great, by the way — with the power cord attached. This means you have to fiddle with attaching it after the 1470 is sitting on its cradle, which was a minor pain in the butt (because I couldn’t actually see the bottom of the unit while sitting in my car’s driver seat) until I got used to it. If it were a centimeter to the left, it wouldn’t have been a problem; there would be room to slide it onto the cradle with the cord already attached. I can’t imagine it would have been terribly difficult, from a design or manufacturing perspective, to switch the microSD flash card slot and the USB port around on the 1470’s circuit board, which would solve this tiny problem.

But that’s really all I can find to complain about. If you’re looking for a really good midrange PND, one that won’t bust your bank account but still has some nice navigation frills — extensive POI list, spoken street names, detailed maps, and lane assist, among them — and can do without the features found on high-end models, you’ll be happy with the 1470. Need traffic service? Magellan provides a free traffic service and to use it with the 1470 you’ll need to buy its traffic data receiver, which is available separately (it is cleverly attached to a power cord that replaces the one that comes with your Magellan unit).

Or you can check out the RoadMate 1475T; it comes with the traffic data receiver onboard (the “T” stands for traffic, doncha know). For more information, check out the RoadMate 1470 page at Magellan. Ready to buy? Stay here and peruse the cheapest deals for the 1470 on GPS Maniac’s shopping site; I just looked and there’s a couple places selling it for under $200.

If I missed anything and you want to know more, feel free to drop me line or just comment here. If I can’t answer your 1470 question, I’ll pester Magellan.

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