Magellan GPS Companion Springboard Module for Handspring Visor

The Map Companion CD-ROM contains detailed nationwide street map coverage, divided into over 20,000 county and city files. With these detailed street maps, the GPS Companion can plot your location and enable you to navigate nearby roads, intersections, and selected points of interest.

The CD-ROM also contains NAV Companion software, which provides you with comprehensive navigation information, including an analog speedometer, a digital compass, and waypoint and route management capabilities. The GPS information screens on your Visor will show your speed, heading, and distance to the next waypoint.

The GPS Companion is powered by two AAA batteries for up to 10 hours of continuous use. Information from the Map Companion CD-ROM can be downloaded to the Handspring Visor from either a Windows or Macintosh platform.

So, DON'T load ANYTHING from the CD included EXCEPT MAPS - and do THAT after you load all the updates from the MFG website, EXCEPT DO NOT use the update labeled "gps updater" that they tell you to download to the unit - delete it - do not run it.

You will be VERY happy with the new software for GPS and MAPS.

The unit is fantastic


Magellan GPS for Visor   June 17, 2003
 8 out of 8 found this review helpful

The Magellan GPS for the Visor works like a champ and I'm very pleased with it. The navigation program that comes with it however, is not very good in details and accuracy. Using it, it gives you the impression that you are off the street you are on. I first thought it was the GPS receiver's fault but it turns out it's the map's fault. I now use the Mapopolis program and the GPS position is spot on with Mapopolis map.

It should be noted that due to the Visor limitation, there's no program I know of that would gives you voice prompt. Without prompts, the utility of using this device for navigation is not that good. The screen is too small to use the Visor as the sole navigator. I find that you still need a paper map. None of this is the magellan GPS fault. In itself, it works great!


You can do a lot better   June 7, 2003
I recently had a chance to test this unit "in the wild" when I spent a week hiking in Yosemite Valley, doing extended hikes each day. In a nutshell, this unit gets a thumbs down. Although it behaved reasonably well on my first hike I found the following problems towards the end of that hike and on most subsequent hikes:

It frequently lost it's fix on the satellites. It could take anywhere from a few seconds to several minutes to re-establish a connection.

Several times on each hike, it powered down my Visor with no indication that it had done so. I'd take the unit out to look at how my tracklog was going only to find it had missed a big chunk of it.

After one of these powerdowns, when I turned the unit back on, it typically took a VERY long time to relink to the satellites...10-15 minutes was not uncommon and, in one case, I gave up and just packed the unit away after an hour of waiting.

Some of the software is pretty cool in concept but very buggy in execution. On my first hike, I recorded Waypoints at every significant point of interest on the hike. At the end of my 6.5 mile hike, I told the unit to convert the tracklog to a Route. It auto-generated a ton of it's own waypoints (understandable given that this was a very twisty, windy route) but it didn't use any of the ones I had recorded and, when it was done, it told me that the 6.5 mile route was now 19.5 miles long!

... this unit here says he got up to 8 hours on a set of batteries. While that's nominally about right based on my experience, I also found that if the batteries were used for more than about 3 or 4 hours, there was a very noticeable decrease in the unit's ability to keep a fix on the satellites.

My impression of this unit went from "REALLY COOL" upon first powering it up to "I WANT MY MONEY BACK" within the first couple of times I used it. ...

A final thought to consider...the Springboard concept is cool but do you really need your Visor to do everything? Certain specialized tasks are just better done by a dedicated unit


Not the greatest   April 1, 2003
 5 out of 5 found this review helpful

The receiver seems to work sometimes, but not as well as some other GPS models that are not part of a PDA. It's also pretty difficult to figure out. The help files are on a PC, not on the PDA. I'm not happy about buying this.