Product Reviews

Many satnavs can direct you to the nearest petrol station or calculate a detour at the touch of a couple of buttons, but that involves taking your eyes off the road and your hand off the steering wheel. Magellan's Maestro 4245 aims to circumvent this problem by using voice recognition, allowing you to command the unit with your voice on the move.

The 4245 comes with both dashboard and windscreen mounts, which is useful if your car's dashboard is particularly deep. The Maestro's screen is incredibly bright, and the interface is easy to use. To find your destination you can enter a postcode or type in a town or street name on the large onscreen keyboard.

Once you've chosen your destination, you're presented with a summary screen that lets you choose between the shortest and fastest routes, how much you want to use motorways and whether or not you want to avoid toll roads. Having these features presented to you at this point is a nice touch, as they're usually buried in the settings menu.

On the road, the 4245 is an excellent navigator. Its navigation screen is very clear and it's easy to see where you're going.

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Voice prompts are also clear and given in plenty of time. Clicking the icon showing the next turn brings up a turn-by-turn summary of your route, and you can flick through the route and click on roads to exclude from the journey. This is useful for avoiding known traffic blackspots on your route. You have to pay extra for a TMC receiver to give you traffic updates, however.

The 4245 has a couple of handy features to help you navigate. When you're approaching a junction, the interface splits in half to show the animated map on the right and a 3D map of the upcoming junction on the left. The junction map means you always know what's coming up, and is particularly useful at large roundabouts. The text-to-speech feature means the 4245 reads out the name of the road you're about to turn into, which, along with the junction map, means you're unlikely to take the wrong road. We've seen text-to-speech before, but the 4245's pronunciation is much more natural and easier to understand than most.

To activate the voice recognition feature, you need to say "Magellan" to the unit. This brings up a list of options, such as finding the nearest restaurant or petrol station. You then say another set phrase such as "Nearest restaurant" to be presented with a numbered list, and then say a number to navigate to that destination automatically. This often worked well, but at other times was infuriatingly slow to respond. In the end we preferred using the touch screen.

Even though its voice recognition is hit and miss, Magellan's Maestro 4245 is an excellent navigator. If you really need traffic information you should buy TomTom's similarly priced Go 720T, but otherwise you won't be disappointed with the Maestro 4245.