An update on how things are going with the Magellan unit:

Its software and UI clearly need a bit of a dot-one upgrade. This feels like late beta or one-dot-zero software. There are some things that don't work well, and it tends to have strange kinds of occasional lockups. Fortunately, those are solved with a poke at its reset switch, and for the most part, the UI is just fine.

Its mapping data is very accurate (in one instance, more accurate than an expensive printed map book I had in the car in the case of one obscure side street), but its choices about where to route me I disagree with sometimes. Not because it's wrong, but because I know more about the streets than it does. For example, at one point it routed me directly straight across a busy multilane highway. Which is a legal thing to do at that spot on that highway, but it doesn't know that the intersection it chose to do it at doesn't have any stop signs or signals to stop the highway traffic and give me the faintest chance of making it straight across. If it had only routed me one block further north first, I would have had a proper signal intersection at which to make it across the highway.

It does do a good job of rerouting me when I go off the beaten track. I've avoided a number of serious traffic jams with it. Which was the primary purpose for me buying it, and it does it well. It is, however, still up to me to remember which of the main sidestreets get badly jammed at rush hour and avoid those.

One thing I'd like to see changed in its next dot-upgrade: Avoiding multiple streets. Let's say I've already told it to route me sans-freeways to avoid traffic jams. Okay, great. Now it puts me on a sidestreet that's also jammed. I punch in "avoid this street" and it does so. But then let's say the street it routes me down is ALSO jammed. If I punch in "avoid THAT street", it re-routes me down the first street. (even though I know for a fact there's a third option it's not giving me.) In other words, it can only remember how to avoid ONE street, and as soon as I try to punch in a second street to avoid, it forgets I'd told it to avoid the first one.

On the good side, I really like how it knows all the Chevron stations and Wendy's restaurants on my main routes. And the indications of when it's approaching the next turn are dead-accurate and give me exactly as much information as I need to be able to make the turns comfortably without missing them.