Update on the Magellan 6230LM: It arrived last Saturday and is now on its way back to Amazon for a refund. Here's the letter I wrote to the president of Magellan, explaining why:
Peggy Fong, President
Magellan GPS
471 El Camino Real
Santa Clara, CA 95050-4300
Dear Ms Fong
I have been a happy Magellan GPS customer for some years, and currently own several of your products.
Recently I purchased (from Amazon) your latest GPS, the 6230-LM GPS-Dashcam. It is on its way back to Amazon for a refund. I thought you might find use in knowing why.
It wasn’t easy to purchase this product. It seems in great demand, and has been in back-order countrywide. I was delighted to purchase it, and eagerly pleased when it arrived last Saturday.
I immediately placed it in service in one of my vehicles and drove around a little. Then I played the video back on the Magellan device itself. I was surprised to see that the video was jerky and that it was plagued with frequent dropouts, or freeze-ups (several per minute), each lasting from about 1/5 second to several seconds; the longest was about four seconds.
Well, I thought, perhaps on the PC it will be better. So I hooked it up to one of my PCs, which was running Windows XP at the time, and attempted to run the Magellan Player from the little memory card. It crashed with a Data Execution Prevention violation. DEP is an optional hardware/software feature not present in all PCs.
Well, OK, I’ll try it in Windows 7 on the same PC. It came up fine, and after fumbling around I was able to save the video as an AVI file on one of my solid-state drives. Playing this AVI in Windows Media Player, the jerkiness and the freeze-ups were still there, unfortunately.
Then I booted back into Windows XP and tried it there. Whenever I attempted to browse to the drive containing the AVI, Windows itself crashed! Back to Windows 7, delete the directory that contained only that AVI. Then back to Windows XP, and once again I was able to browse my disk drive.
Curious, I attempted to run the Magellan player in another XP system that doesn’t have the DEP feature. It came up, but I didn’t attempt actually to view or save any video on that PC.
So I’m guessing that you tested the software on a non-DEP Windows XP system but not on one that had DEP. That’s an unwise omission, wouldn’t you agree? But it seems to run in Windows 7 with DEP.
Another thing that disappointed me considerably is the downloadable User Manual on your web site. I downloaded and printed it and found an amazing number of errors.
Samples:
Many misspellings of the word maneuver as manuver. Sometimes the two spellings occur in the same short line of text.
Several misspellings of receiver as reciever.
On page seven there are two images of the 6230-LM, labeled with capital letters starting with B. Accompanying, there is text in short paragraphs labeled starting with A. The text for A describes the feature labeled B; the text for B describes the feature labeled C; and so forth. This is true for both of the illustrations on page 7, and for others on pages 22, 23 and 24. May I say I found this confusing until I figured it out. It isn’t your best advertisement.
In several places the plural criteria is used when the singular criterion is meant.
In at least one place in the manual there appears the nonexistent word ut.
In at least one place in the manual the word too occurs when clearly to is meant.
I contacted Customer Support, describing the problems with the video and the problems on the PC: support case 59391. Three or four days later I received a reply from Dan – AM 20354 which addressed only the video problem. Clearly he had not read my whole 250 words. He advised that I reformat the memory card. I did that, and tried again. The video was now even worse. I replied to him, but have heard nothing back.
Amazon seems very accommodating, and my 6230-LM is on its way back for a refund.
I think you may have been in a little too great rush to market; to me this product seems actually unmerchantable.
In a spirit of helpfulness I enclose my printed copy of the downloaded User Manual, in which I have indicated numerous errors (I count 67 of them) that need correcting. While you probably cannot find a proofreader with skills equaling mine, surely you can find someone better than you have.
Sincerely
Carl Hayes
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-- Carl
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