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The first thing you’ll notice when firing up the Magellan 5310 – after the annoying “Keep your eyes on the road” screen – is its simple and intuitive Main Menu. It’s actually so simple that even your grandparents should be able to get started. When entering an address, the combination of Magellan’s touch keyboard with its input-assist algorithm is second to none. Starting with a city, you can begin entering a street name. Magellan kindly grays out the letters that don’t match its database and by the time you enter three or four characters, it gives you a list of probable matches. In my case, my street starts with “Z” so after one character it already knew where I was headed. Also helpful is a range of valid house numbers for that street.
Once you input your destination, Magellan asks how you’d like to get there. Do you want the fastest time, shortest distance, most/least use of freeways? Do you want to avoid toll roads? Once you decide, press the big orange button and off you go. These route modification filters are handy but I’d like to see what each choice does to affect your arrival time. I wouldn’t mind waiting an extra few seconds for that information since not having it makes for a somewhat blind decision.
With its 5-inch widescreen display, the 5310 is on the large side of portable units. It’s not what I’d call pocket size so most users will probably use the included dashboard or windshield mount. After taking a few trips around northeast Connecticut and western Massachusetts, GPS sensitivity and location accuracy was exceptionally good. Audible turn warnings occurred precisely when they should have and new street names would reflect within 1-3 seconds of making a turn. Also worth noting is that the 5310 has a loud speaker for delivering voice assistance. It’s so loud that – get this – you can actually hear it while driving at highway speeds.
The 3-D map screens are pleasing to the eye and easy to process quickly while driving. There’s a high-contrast night mode for reduced eye strain, but the menu screens remain a blinding blue even in this mode. I’d like to see night mode carry through to the menus in future additions to the Maestro series, but day or night the 5310’s map screens are easy on the eyes.
The 5310 comes with a free year of Navteq traffic alerts, but being a rural telecommuter didn’t give me much opportunity to test the usefulness of this functionality. You can configure the 5310 so that traffic “events” automatically trigger a re-route and you can also define how far ahead you want the system to monitor for said events: within 10, 20 or 40 miles. There’s also a “Live Alert” mode which will re-calculate your route the instant a traffic event is received regardless of how far away it is.
Like many current GPS units, the Maestro 5310 comes loaded with three zillion points of interest (POI). I was primarily concerned with finding bank ATMs, restaurants and gas stations and the 5310 did a fine job locating the ones I knew about plus a few I didn’t. “Exit POIs” is an exceptionally useful feature which tells you what can be found off the highway using upcoming exits.
One final feature that’s worth mentioning is the Maestro’s trip planner. In addition to letting you input multiple destinations, the 5310 has a route optimization engine which can re-order that list so you make the best overall time.
The Mastro 5310 doesn’t reinvent the wheel or sport any radical new features but if you spend some time with it you’ll see there’s a lot to like. From its attractive and intuitive interface to useful features such as “Exit POIs” and optimized trip planning, the 5310 does everything you’d expect from a quality GPS unit and it does it well. yy
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