While most GPS devices require you to pull over -- or at least take your eyes off the road -- to change destination, Magellan’s Maestro 4245 offers the far safer option of voice recognition for route planning. If you need to find a destination such as a restaurant or petrol station in a hurry, you can just bark instructions at the device and it will find your way. It’s also a high-specification navigator with full maps of Western Europe.

The Maestro 4245’s black and silver finish looks stylish and the screen is incredibly bright. It’s also very easy to use. Sensibly, once you’ve set your destination country in the options menu, it becomes the default, and you don’t have to enter it every time you want to type in your destination. This makes a change from many satnavs with European maps, which insist you’re taking a continental trip even when you’re just driving to the shops.

You can find your destination by typing in a full UK postcode, or type in town and street names. The on-screen keyboard has large letters and is very responsive, and doesn’t slow down as the device consults its place name database to eliminate names that no longer apply.

Another thoughtful touch is that once you’ve found your destination, the Maestro 4245 displays an options screen which lets you choose between shortest time and shortest distance, how often you want to use motorways and whether or not you want to avoid toll roads. On many GPS devices these options are buried away in settings menus, so it’s refreshing to see them presented at an opportune moment during route planning.

Route calculation is fast and once you’re on the move, the Maestro 4245 is a competent navigator. Its maps aren’t as pretty as those on TomTom or Garmin devices, but they’re very clear and your route is clearly marked by a bright green line. The top of the screen shows your current road, while the bar at the bottom shows the distance to your next turning and the name of the road. Usefully, the volume icon is superimposed on the map display, so it only takes a couple of finger presses to change the volume or mute the unit.

The Maestro 4245’s voice prompts are clear and given in plenty of time and the display updates reasonably smoothly, but there are a couple of things that set it apart from other satnavs.

The first is the excellent text to speech support. The Maestro 4245 speaks the name of each street you’re turning into and the pronunciation is superb, and far less robotic than that of other text to speech systems we’ve heard. Hearing the name of the road means you don’t have to look at the display, and can make all the difference at a complicated junction.

But perhaps the most impressive feature is the way the Maestro 4245 displays information about upcoming turns. When you’re approaching a junction, the display splits in half, with an animated top-down view of your progress on the right and a 3D display of the approaching junction on the left, with an arrow to indicate your turning. It makes navigating junctions and roundabouts a breeze. Unfortunately, although the 4245 has speed camera alerts as standard, you have to pay extra for a TMC traffic information receiver. 

If you find you’re running low on fuel or dying for a bite to eat, you don’t have to fiddle with the screen to find your nearest services. Instead, just say “Magellan” to turn on the voice command feature, then say set phrases such as “Nearest Restaurant” to bring up a list of services in the area. You can then say the number you want in the list, and the Maestro 4245 will guide you there. You can also ask it to plot a detour.

Unfortunately, our experience with the voice prompts was hit and miss. The It would sometimes respond instantly, but if the Maestro 4245 was dealing with some complicated roads there would be an appreciable delay between saying the activation word and the screen appearing. We found it was generally easier to risk using the touch screen.

Even though its voice control is more of a gimmick than a strictly useful feature, we were still impressed with the Magellan Maestro 4245. Its route planning and navigation interfaces work beautifully, and its text-to-speech function helps take the stress out of navigating. It’s also fairly good value. If you need traffic alerts you should go for TomTom’s similarly-priced Go 720T, which also has voice recognition, but the Maestro 4245 is a better overall navigator.

Magellan Maestro 4245

Specifications

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