User Review: Magellan Triton 200

Magellan Triton 200
Above: The current Triton 200, which may differ slightly from the version reviewed.

Reviewed July 7, 2009 by Lou Sansevero

Rating:
Price Paid: $129

After 2 years trying to get this piece of trash to work I’ve given up and thrown it in a drawer, eaten the $129 purchase price, and sworn never to buy anything from this outfit again.

Firstly, if you are a first time gps buyer (like I was) don't be fooled by the image on the box or used in Magellan’s advertisements. The unit only comes with a "base map" that is absolutely useless as far as I'm concerned. The “base map” is basically a flat grayish-green background completely devoid of any detail with a very few red lines (major freeways) depicted and a sparse sprinkling of dots (with city names) not the colourful, detailed topographical map you’d expect from the image on the box and used in advertising.

In order to have any usable map detail with this unit you'll need to buy various add on, after market "topo" maps (ranging in price from about $30 to $100), after purchasing these add-ons you’ll have the challenge of trying to download them to the unit.

If you are successful in loading the add-on maps to this unit (and I haven't been) you'll soon discover that 10 mb of storage (that’s about the amount of free space for maps, photos, waypoints, etc. that is available on the unit) isn't very much storage and severely limits the device's usability which brings us to another negative issue . . .

Magellan's customer support should be more appropriately called “customer non-support” . . . I haven’t been able to load the add-on maps to my unit mainly because the firmware that runs the software was too old from the day I first fired up the gps and for the 2 years that I've owned this piece of junk I've been unable to upgrade it.

After countless attempts (at various times over the 2 years) to get their customer non-support to figure out why my upgrade attempts continually fail I’ve given up. Not only is their non-support non-responsive but their written instructions concerning the upgrade process don’t coincide with the various menus on the unit, for example to upgrade the instructions tell you to attach the unit to your computer and select “connect to pc” from the connectivity menu on the unit . . . trouble is there is no “connect to pc” selection on that or any other menu.

Additionally I initially tried using this unit mounted on my ATV, which is the reason I purchased it in the first place, and found that (1) the display was almost totally un-viewable in bright sunlight and (2) turned off in a very short period of time . . . both of which make the unit useless in my estimation.

In conclusion, if you’re looking to buy a gps stay clear of this one, purchase one with the facility to use SD or MicroSD cards for map storage and from one of the other manufacturers (Garmin, Lowrence, etc.) who have real customer support and will support you after the purchase.

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