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This piece costs $229.99 original price on Magellan website.

I did all research on Amazon and eBay, between Magellan and Garmin. Finally I decided to buy this unit, $99.99 a piece – great deal! Magellan Roadmate 1424 is brand new on the market, “Date first available at Amazon.com: October 1, 2009″ means you have new map – no need to pay extra money to get new map update. There are not many people out there know about this unit, that’s why Amazon brought down the price of this unit. This unit has Navteq map which is supposed to be very accurate. I was thinking about getting Magellan Roadmate 1440 because of lane asssist, but I came up with “lane assist is no need”. You can see the direction on a GPS and signs on the road which is keep-an-eye-on-the-road.

Customer service of Magellan is not as good as Garmin’s, so I decided to buy 3 year warranty from SquareTrade.
Rating: 5 / 5

Although I have owned an in vehicle navigation product that was built-in to a car, this was my first time with an aftermarket navigation system. The navigation is excellent and satellite acquisition is quick. The display is good, but in the brightest sunlight is a bit challenging to see. This isn’t necessarily a fault unique to this product.

Overall the most impressive thing about this unit is it’s size and build quality. So compact yet with maps for the entire US and North America.

I think that it should have come with an in-home plug-in charger in addition to the in car charger, but that’s my pet peeve.

One of the larger omissions (IMHO) was not stating on the box or in the literature that updating the software and maps in the navigation unit requires a Windows PC. It can NOT be updated via any Apple computers. Ouch!

Finally, I am told the map updates are around $80. Sounds steep, but considering what it takes to update a digital map of the entire US, a fairly cheap price. And frankly, unless you are driving somewhere that has brand new roads, you won’t notice the difference. You could just wait and buy an entirely new unit every few years for not much more money. But I actually believe that it’s a good idea to support the updating of the maps by purchasing an update.

The technical support I received (when I had a question about how to switch the map from 2D to a 3D view and back) was very competent, and surprised me considering the initial purchase price of the unit. Magellan seems to have good people and customer friendly policies.
Rating: 4 / 5

First, I owned a Magellan Maestro 3100, basic earlier generation unit. I much preferred the usability of the interface to the Garmin & Tom Tom equivalents. The Roadmate 1424 improves and addresses virtually all my annoyances with the older series.

Pros:

Acquires signal very fast

Recalculates routes so fast you barely notice (and it no longer announces “recalculating”, just does it).

Allows you to “insert” and immediately route to any POI or destination, then continue to original destination.

Shows graphic map and estimated time for all 4 routing ‘options’ making it much easier to select your choice (I’d prefer exact distance to estimated time, but it’s pretty good).

Routing is faster and shortest route now tends to avoid unpaved roads (I live in a rural area).

Has 2nd generation of their One Touch interface (2 screens worth of programmable icons)

Having applied their 2.20 firmware upgrade, it has never reset, frozen or gone into ‘calculating’ mode like some report on the 1440 & 1470.

Cons:

Position tends to lag 10-20 yards behind actual position, a problem the entire 14** series seems to have, Magellan is aware and a firmware upgrade to cure this is expected.

If you like to fiddle with different voices, forget it, no choices and no memory slot, but it already has the largest/newest POI file Magellan offers.

It’s just a GPS, doesn’t play music, doesn’t show vids, doesn’t bake pizza.
Rating: 5 / 5