My office’s Garmin was stuck in a branch office last week, and we needed a GPS for the next morning, so we got a cheapo Magellan Triton 400 for $90 at Future Shop. I think that’s a clearance price, and none of the big-box retailers still carry it.
The Triton 400’s a Windows CE unit with a surprisingly good display for the price. I only had a little time to set it up and test it briefly outside the office, so all I can do is give you is first impressions.
Pros:
- Cheap!
- SIRFstarIII chipset for reasonably fast/accurate acquisition
- SDHC card (worked with my 4GB card)
- Bright display
- Works with GPSBabel (as Magellan’s VantagePoint obviously installs a copy)
- Doesn’t route
Cons:
- Wouldn’t acquire any position until I updated the firmware (at which time I discovered that it basically updates a full Windows CE image from an archive)
- Weird proprietary USB cable
- Tiny buttons that aren’t very positive
- Eats batteries
- Overly simplistic menu structure makes it hard to set up
- VantagePoint is buggy, and will repeatably crash under certainly (admittedly rare) menu items
- Only works under Windows; the USB protocol is proprietary
- Hard limit of 5000 points per track, and track logging stops when this limit is reached
- SD card is only usable for maps and geotagged photos, not track storage.
I should be able to play with it in more detail in the new year. It was cheap, but not all cheap things are good.
More on the Magellan – OpenStreetMap Wiki page.