GPS gets road names
Wave goodbye to sussing which lane your sat-nav's telling you to get into - Magellan's just designed the world's first system that'll read the road names out loud
Magellan’s just announced the most heavily-specced portable sat nav we’ve ever seen.
The RoadMate 760 may look the same as the old 700. Indeed, one might say it’s physically identical. But don’t be deceived by its innocuous appearance. It has some fine new features, the most exciting being text-to-speech so it can tell you to “turn left onto Hampton Road” rather than just “turn left in 300 yards”. Also worthy of interest is something called SmartDetour, a neat feature that’ll automatically replot your route if you’re sitting in a jam for long.
And the beefy spec? You get a 20GB hard disk (room for 27 in-detail European maps, still the best in the UK), 2.5 x 3in screen, a database of one million points of interest, and an IR port for receiving beamed Pocket PC and Palm addresses. Rounding things out is Wide Area Augmentation System, which theoretically makes your location more accurate but – in our experience – usually makes little difference.
It’s on sale now for £700.
Dan Grabham
Editor-in-Chief