I bought my Magellan Maestro 4050 about six months ago on Amazon.com. Sofar I am pleased with all the features and its functioning, but still a bit dissatisfied when I was holding my GPS 4050 at point A and tried to get direction from point B to point C. Magellan Maestro does not have that route. So when you have your GPS 4050 in your hand at point A, you can not make a map direction from point B to point C like you can make through Yahoo map or Google map. I don't know why GPS makers do not think about that?????? Another drawback that sometimes the Bluetooth froze and the touch screen doesnot respond. I have to push a reset on side to make it work.

The Magellan Maestro 4050 is the first GPS I have bought. However I have used the Never Lost Hertz rental car GPS on more then one occasion and was looking for a GPS much the same. The 4050 is that unit. It just works and has all the bells and whistles I could want. If it does or doesn't do something I need or want I haven't found it yet. Price wise it's a bucket of bang for the buck. I had to call their support in order to get my free road advisory service and the free extended warranty given to AAA members up and activated. I was unable to accomplish this on line using the CD that comes with the unit or via Magellan's web site. However customer support had me up and running in no time. Great unit, great price and good support. If your thinking upscale GPS this is a good one.

BW, Florida ......

Other than poor documents, this is a great GPS. I had seen some reviews that were not to good so I was a little leary. No problems with my unit what-so-ever. The maps were a little inaccurate until I went online and updated. After update, the maps, points of interest, shopping etc all were terrific and accurate. A real good unit for my money!

I bought the maestro 4050 refurbished for my husband. And so far so good. He had been using "verizon navigator" on his phone for the last year except for the many rental cars that came with the built in navigator.

Out of the box magellan was up and running in less than 10 minutes. We took it for a drive and it responded well. SOme people have complained that its a little slow to reroute, but we didn't think it was any different than the verizon navigator would have been.

We only subscribed to the traffic kit this past weekend, so that has not been put to the test yet, however, we DID have to call magellan customer service, as the 3 month free subscription code was missing, and i have to say, though other reviewers are correct, they don't speak "native" english, they were very helpful and professional and within 10-15 minutes the traffic kit was up and running. I'll have to update this post after we use that for a while.

The bluetooth was a little difficult initially to pair up, but now its practically automatic. We have talked to eachother, my husband through the magellan blue tooth and me on my cell phone, and the sound is not horrible. Just some "airiness" to the background which i would think is to be expected.

As far as the voice command of magellan, its also pretty good. We have found that there are certain times magellan will not respond to your commmand as most likely the magellan company doesn't want you talking to the device while you are driving. So the simple "magellan" (to wake it up) and "nearest gas" and SIMPLE stuff like that is all you are permitted to do, but that would seem to be almost enough.

DH also figured out this past weekend how to add address/contacts so they show in your bluetooth phone area of the device. That will make it easy for him to hit a couple of the icons on the device and be dialing someone.

ALso, one of the other reasons i bought this is because of the AAA, cuz my DH is already a memeber. I think that will be helpful over time, and also i think the device has a ton of POIs, though it didn't seem to be able to find my local Wal-Mart that has existed for about 5 years. But i have found that you sometimes need to search differntly to get what you are looking for.

All in all, we think its a pretty decent device. I did get a good price on a reburbed ($199.) so i think its definalty worth that money.

I'd say buy one and try it, i think a lot of the options on these things are just personal preference, so you just have to try it and see if it works for you.

Upon receipt of the the 4050 it was not operational. I called Magellan Customer Service and they immediately sent me a 4250 which is an upgrade from the 4050. I then returned the 4050 to Magellan. The BEST customer service I have encountered lately. This is my 3rd Magellan GPS. I tried a Garmin 650 and it does not measure up to the Magellan.

Purchased the Magellan Maestro for a long road trip in which I intended to do a good deal of back-road driving and wanted a GPS system that could get me back to civilization as quickly as possible. The Maestro 4050 is a fine GPS system. Easy and intuitive; you can start using it right away, out of the box. It's simple interface allows you to input address, destinations, find POI's (Points of Interest, coffee, gas, ATM's) My unit came with the Traffic Kit feature and I had a hard time getting that feature activated. The actual activation has to been accomplished through the Magellan web site, you input your coupon code and the web site should issue you a activation code. The web site would not give me an activation code so I called customer service and spoke to a level 1 helpdesk employee who assured that he did not understand why it would not work but if it continued not to work I should definitely call back. I did. On the second call they bumped me to a level 2 helpdesk person who did assist me in finally activating my product. It took a few days but it did work. And after all that, I have to say that in my opinion the Traffic Kit is a feature I can live without. It only works within the limits of major cities and gives cryptic warnings about traffic conditions, often when your already in the thick of it.

In summary: The Magellan Maestro is a great GPS system, the voice recognition system works well (not perfect, and by all means don't yell at it, seriously; it responds better when you speak in a normal conversational tone.) The Traffic Kit is a good idea but doesn't provide enough insight to make it worth the subscription fee.

we went to spring break vacation to Orlando florida with Magellan 4050 Gps,It was perfectly worked to my trip. Unfortunately it didn't work on my return trip. The gps was frozen.

Thanks

Mathew

Wanted the bigger screen, text-to-speech, and voice recognition. Unit provides limited voice commands but I hope future firmware revisions (downloadable) might expand this. Questions about accuracy began on my first trial run to a house ten blocks away. The unit's last instruction was to "turn left" (wrong). It usually gets "your destination is on the right (or left)" wrong. BUT the huge problem was while routing to a rural address I had not been to when it directed me perfectly to the wrong house fully 6 MILES south of the actual destination (in blowing snow). We re-entered the address, got the same wrong result, and so phoned for directions). Once there we verified that we had and had entered the correct address. Google Earth the next morning indicated the correct location using that address, meaning that the 4050 just plain had it wrong. I emailed Magellan customer service and asked for some/any explanation that would give me some confidence in this $450 product. To date I have received no response. Industry reviews and my experience with this high-end Magellan confirm: if you want accuracy (and that's what these are for) go with Garmin.

I had bought a Mio C310 a year ago and thought of buying a more renowed with text-to-spech unit. So I got the Magellan Maestro 4050. On my first trip with it to Tennessee, it left me going in circles in Johnson City. Good thing I had my old Mio C310 unit in my suitcase for an emergency, which guided me right through. Conclusion, now I have 2 Mio's, the C310 and the newly bought C520 model. Although it costed me much less than the Magellan, so far it's working like I expected it to work. My only proplem with it is that it only has "Samanthas" voice in the TTS feature.

I'll appreciate if anybody out there would let me know if I can, and how can I change the Samantha's voice.

With todays tech toys I have to say it is a fine addition to my car. The product does work well and only had one glitch which was easily resolved by recalculating trip. I activated the free trail of their traffic service but was not impressed and would think twice before paying for.

It has a SD slot to update your device and add POI's but that is its limit! A built in memory card and a USB port would of made more scene. I would hate to think how long it takes to manually add 2 gigs of POI's to my SD. You also need a second SD "empty" to update your unit. Other GPS offer media formats: Media player, MP3, and Picture display. Media would of added features I would of valued.

My over all feeling is: it good but could easily have been so much more. If it is a NAME BRAND GPS you crave with no thrills this could be for you otherwise there are other GPS units that offer more versatility for less money.