The New Magellan 9720 Truck GPS

does it look like it will have the power cord issues that the RM has? where is the connector and how sturdy is the plug?

I'm about to retire my 710. complete junk. i agree about the routing and sending you places you shouldn't be....the 710 does as well........alot of times i'll pick a better route or go by my route sugesstion and it recacalculates the better route and better time once i stray from it's better idea lol will be watching your experience with it i need something dependable that won't act like it knows better than me when i can read a map or won't die on me for the most part after only a year out of the box

 

Anybody have any experience with the TomTom units?

 

i have one of the newer models its not truck gps, imo they are junk. They are very slow and inaccurate. And it seems to get worse with age. I got mind for christmas and its not to far from dying

 

i only lasted 2 weeks with RM. due to it's lousy routing.

constantly put me on roads that trucks aren't allowed, didn't like it when i took roads that trucks ARE allowed.


my last run using the rand was vegas to phoenix. it wanted me to take the 40 into flagstaff and down 17. i instead took the 93. but got tired of it hollering at me so i went into prescott. it took me into residential areas. totally bypassing the turn i need to cut across to 17. and couldn't find it's way out. had to use sprint nav to get me out of there. once i got on the 17 it stopped hollering.

i seen the signs for 17 but figured i'd see how rand navigated me to get there. it got lost. that was my final decision to ditch it.

most of my stops it couldn't find.

traded for pcmiler and have had no regrets. it's just a basic truck gps. but i don't need all that fancy stuff. i just want to know where i'm going. it's not perfect but it does very well 99 % of the time. my actual atlas on paper collects dust more then it gets read now. which was more then i could say for rand.

i don't know how anyone can think that thing is the hottest device.

 

That would be the 9270. My personal opinion so far is thus---

The way Magellan has set up it's routing choices is certainly-um unique. So far however, it has come up interesting routes and 1 non-doable route ( cutting the corner from I40 to I17 instead of going through Flagstaff for instance). I would like to see more control over routing or at least, routing that is more consistent with the choices offered. I haven't had it long enough to evaluate if routing is consistent with the profile standards but based on these routings-I have a hazmat load at the moment-I'd have to say no.

POIs- there is no provision for displaying truck specific POI only. Nor are there any provisions for truck specific alerts such as scales, low bridges etc. Every device on the market prior to the release of this one has-in some form or another-had that capability. It is dang near an industry standard. POI icons are pretty much generic icons (not a deal breaker, just an observation) and they appear to be correctly located.

The speed limit sign is supposed to appear while following a route- haven't seen it yet.

I am just east of Gallup at the Pilot as I post this and I noticed that the traffic is active. I think the nearest Navteq sources, which is what this uses for traffic data, are Phoenix and Albuquerque though I need to check my cheat sheet for that information. Also, with the weather in the area, we maybe experiencing some ducting of signals so don't read much into this as of yet.

As far as hardware is concerned. I also think the way they engineered the power supply into the mount is a smart way to go. Garmin also did that and I had very little trouble with the adapter unlike RM's earlier 700 and 500 series (electrical or duct tape is and will always be a good fix). As far as the 720 is concerned- the jury is still out. I don't think there is much difference in putting the adapter port in the side or the back- pretty exposed both places.
The display seems pretty clean and responsive to vehicle movement and the soft switches are responsive. Moving through the pages is fairly intuitive and straight forward. One thing I have noticed is that the top informational line only displays the road you are on if you are not following a route. I think I'd like to see the next exit or cross road- again when not following a route.

These are my humble observations so far IMHO.

Mark

I'm adding to this the one touch feature- impressive. Just configured a few for parking and my favorite fuel stops.

 

There are no state scales....as far as I can see anyway and as for truck specific POI...the user has to define a one- touch button for the specific poi. For example, KW will not come up if you go into auto repair then truck repair. I had to define a one-touch button to do a search under the keyword " kenworth". This was not a predefined search under the truck repair master quick key- only Mack and Volvo are pre defined. To get fuel stops, one has to go into the auto-fuel master catagory then to the truck fuel and do a search. I went ahead and defined four one-touch buttons for my fuel stops. These were not predefined. There is no provision for displaying these poi on the map page as " truck specific" such as in the RM devices. There are a lot of generic icons as well as company specific and these are displayed. A pump icon means there is/ are fuel stop(s) at that location. Touch that icon and it lists all of them, not just the truck specific locations.

A note about traffic. This is- so far at least, the best RDS TMC receiver I have seen! And what a receiver. It discriminates traffic incidents on a route vs incidents not on the route. It will only display incidents on a route as long as the user is following the route. No route and you get the complete list. The reception is far and away the best of the other enabled devices out there imho even more because there is no external antenna required. I was showing RDS reception even when there was no TMC available. So far so good on that end.

(Tmc is just one of the channels on the RDS system which rides on the FM broadcast frequencies if the transmitting station is so equipped. If you have a stereo in your truck that displays song and artist info while listening to an fm station, that is RDS at work)

Mark

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