After years of disliking my Garmin eTrex, I decided to splurge and buy a new GPS. I decided to try another brand, as I felt the Garmin firmware was difficult to use and sluggish. Since I use my GPS unit to geocode local businesses, a camera to take photos, and a pad of paper to record notes, the all-in-one functionality provided by the Triton 2000 caught my eye.

I purchased my Triton 2000 in January, 2008. The price was a bit steep – $420, but the feature set made the price tag seem reasonable. Without reading the manual, I turned on the unit and hated the user interface after 2 minutes of use. I’ve shown the unit to 2 other people and they have had similar experiences. It’s been a month now… I am much more proficient on the unit now, but I still hate the user interface as much as ever. I don’t write product reviews, but I felt I needed to to either 1) get the company to update the firmware to solve many of these problems, or 2) convince other potential buyers to look elsewhere.

I’ve broken my review into 2 parts, one for the device/UI, and one for the Windows software, VantagePoint.

The Magellan Triton 2000 unit and firmware

One of the features that immediately caught my eye was a touch screen and its pen input. This has probably turned into the biggest disappointment of the entire unit. It is nearly impossible to perform any task using only the pen or only the cursor control pad. Also, small complaint about the pen position – the unit must be designed for the 10 percent of the world’s population that is left-handed (citing Wikipedia, see reference there), since the pen release is on the left side of the unit. It is a hassle to release it when holding the unit in your left hand.

There are a few places where the pen input was implemented well. The main menu, and sub menu have big icons, easy to find and use. The text input screen is another. However, the places where the pen input is poorly implemented greatly outnumber the positive uses. For example, although the menus are layered (hitting ESC will generally return you to the previous menu), there is no way to close or cancel a menu using the pen. This forces the user to use the ESC button. Another example is the create waypoint screen. If you quickly want to add a waypoint, you need to scroll down to see the green “accept” checkbox. The scroll bar is so thin that you usually end up tapping in the large comment box, popping up the text entry screen.

The control pad is a complete piece of junk. It is difficult to manuever, and makes an annoying squeaky noise every time it is pressed. It feels cheap and I fear breaking it from pushing with enough force to have it accept my commands. Pressing down on the cursor control pad is often mistaken for pressing the enter button, which frequently causes unintended behaviors. All too often, the control pad ceases to function, until you use the touch screen to change screens.

The buttons on the sides and front of the unit are well designed and have a solid feel to them. Kudos!

The user interface has a variety of issues. As mentioned previously, the menus need close or cancel functionality. The UI tends to become unresponsive to pen input time after time. I find that I can tap something 4 or 5 times and it will not be accepted, but then pressing the enter button on the control pad will work immediately. Taking a photo and attaching to a previous waypoint does not work because the only waypoints that show, regardless of sort order, are the first 4 or 5 waypoints stored on the unit. There is no scroll bar to browse for additional ones, either. The speed of the UI is sometimes quick and responsive, and other times sluggish and painful. It has not crashed as of this writing.

Setting the time… why is this so difficult? The the time can be determined based on the timestamp in the GPS signals, but changing the time zone was difficult to find, buried deep in the profile settings. There should be a top level menu item for settings, and the time zone should be one of the first things you can change.

The camera… to take a photo, you need to click on View-Media-Take Photo. Maybe I’m too nit-picky, but “Take Photo” being under the “View” menu does not seem intuitive – Create would have been more logical. Enough about that. The camera start up time is between 10-15 seconds, even between photos. The image quality makes all photos appear dark and gloomy, even under bright sunlight.

Start up time is better than my 4 year old Garmin unit. Although, a minute wait, even in the same location seems too long.

There is no feedback when a waypoint is saved. You are only returned to the previous menu.

Scrolling through the GPS screens can only be done using the Page and ESC buttons. There should be a popup menu that easily allows you to jump to a certain screen.

The metal contacts of the unit are always exposed. I’m not sure this is a good design for boating or living in a tropical environment like I do. They are gold plated, so I’m hoping they do not rust or corrode. I am worried about scratching the contacts when I carry the unit in a backpack or my pocket.

After downloading all my saved waypoints to my compuer, I wanted to erase them from the unit. After finding the settings menu, I clicked “Clear memory”. This not only took the waypoints, but my saved profile information as well. The waypoint images that I took remained, and I needed to manually remove those from the Media menu. There was also an option for “Format SD card”, I’m not certain if that would have only removed the images, the waypoints, or the profile settings.

VantagePoint software for Windows

It amazes me at the poor quality of software that companies are still able to create. This software looks like something a 13 year old could whip up over a two week period. My apologies to 13 year old programmers!

The unit comes with an installation CD, but there is no software actually on the CD. You have to go to the website and download it. You are also forced to register in order to download the software.

There is no typical drop-down menu bar at the top of the application. However, this appears to be a new trend in UI design – making things more difficult for the user to find. After all, you can’t do anything wrong if you can’t DO anything!

The coordinate system on the unit is in decimal format (useful for Google Maps geocoding). However, the units in the software are in degrees/minutes/seconds. There is no way to change the displayed units. If you export to CSV, the units are in degrees/minutes/seconds, but exporting to LOC you can get the decimal coordinates.

I have not used this software for too much just yet – there is no street map software for my city of Playa del Carmen. Therefore, my use is limited to pulling off the stored information. With that said, I have not yet been able to find a way to remove stored waypoints from the GPS unit or manage the photo waypoints I’ve taken.

The settings you can configure are very limited. For example, there is no way to change the directory for saved media retrieved from the device. It is saved automatically to a directory located under the installation directory for VantagePoint.

When trying to sync media, it complains about duplicate file names that it had previously downloaded from the unit. All images are selected by default, so you need to unselect all duplicates manually, or it will download new versions of the images and create new copies with a number appended to the file name. This wasn’t too bad with 20 images, but I can see this turning into a nightmare under heavy use.

I am hoping that many of these issues can be resolved with firmware and software updates. The cheap feel of the contol pad, sluggish response of the camera, and poor picture quality of the camera probably cannot.

firmware: 1, 14, 0, 46, 2007/12/21
VantagePoint v. 1.25