I bought the Magellean Roadmate 700 at Costco in Mississauga about a year ago. About $990 Canadian.

Highly recommend.

Small, fits in briefcase, portable.
Shows streets, highways, gives audio and displayed directions. Usually very accurate.

It is the same basic item as in the Hertz NeverLost system. Different packaging and slightly different data base. For example the Hertz database includes the entire CAA/AAA Tour book hotel and restaurant database. The public commercial one seems to instead use the telephone book.

Have used it for business and pleasure. Business use is primarily to find the hotel and the airport. Plug it into the rental and type in the address of the hotel or select the hotel name. Takes sometimes about 5-10 minutes to lock on to the satellites. Has taken 15-20 if woken up after being teleported across the country. Needs to be plugged into a 12V plug or use the 110V adapter. No standalone battery powered capability.

Works like a charm. Have used it all across Canada and in the US Arizona to New England. In northern New Brunswick or Quebec had some odd displacments sometimes. Showed me 50-100 feet off the side of the road. I attributed that to locking on to satellites that were low in the sky, near the horizon. Fixed itself later in the day.

Finding closest restaurant, Tim Hortons, or grocery store when travelling has been excellent. Has saved hours and made life much more convenient. Who would have known that there was a Tim Hortons 3 streets over in a strange town.

When taking a wrong turn or forced off the route because of highway closure it automatically computes a new route.

Has an option for shortest time, shortest distance and use or not use freeways. I have had a lot of fun in backroads of Ontario and Quebec by selecting shortest distance instead of shortest time. Takes you through some little country roads and dirt access roads. Really far off the beaten path. I recommend a paper backup of Ontario Back Roads Road Atlas or the Quebec equivalent from MapArt publishing to see where you are if you play that way.

The hard disk drive has the all North America loaded. No need to change data bases. Apparently Europe is also loaded but an extra fee needs to be paid to unlock that part of the data base.

There is a PC connector cable and plug. Have never used it. Probably should because the only real complaint has been outdated data base entries. Resturant has gone out of business or new roads have been built. Apparently there are supposed to be updates issued periodically and available over the internet. I signed up to receive notification when one is released. Have not received a notification yet and when I checked in the spring there was no data base update available. Software updates are also supposedly available. When I checked in the spring there had not been a software update in the past 12 months.

I am pretty sure there are extensive discussions in the Technology forum. I believe that is where I found some excellent discussions and links to the websites already mentioned and other links.

ShortHaul