Magellan launches new touch screen eXplorist GPS units
Magellan and their Australian distributor, Next Destination, recently unveiled the next generation of its award-winning, rugged eXplorist hand-held GPS devices for the outdoor recreation market.
The new eXplorist 510 and 610 devices allow adventurers to navigate to outdoor destinations worldwide, capture geo-tagged photos along the way, and share their experiences online when they return home.
Each touch screen eXplorist model combines high-sensitivity GPS, an intuitive user interface, easy-to-read mapping and optional Sat Nav voice command navigation suitable for the outdoor adventurer and four-wheel drive enthusiast to navigate from door to track and back. The new series of hand-held GPS units will be available to consumers in Australia in October 2010.
“With more and more people adventuring outdoors, Magellan has produced a ruggedized outdoor handheld GPS that not only displays Topo and Raster maps, but also has Sat Nav capabilities with voice guidance - the ultimate GPS for 4WDers and outdoor enthusiasts who venture off the sealed stuff” said Jason Beltran, product development manager for Next Destination.
“Not ignoring the popularity of social networks, Magellan has also designed the eXplorist series to allow users to easily capture and share their outdoor adventure online, or store for reference.”
Both of the new eXplorist handheld GPS units come equipped with a camera, microphone, and speaker to enable users to record and share their adventures with friends.
Each eXplorist device features a 3” colour touch screen, a 3.2 mega-pixel camera with auto-focus, microphone and speaker to record geo-referenced images, videos, and voice notes. All products in the eXplorist series are waterproof (IPX-7) and come preloaded with the most detailed worldwide map in the industry. Magellan’s World Edition map includes a complete road and street network for Australia plus Western Europe, the USA and Canada, as well as water features, urban and rural areas and a realistic shaded relief background. They also ship preloaded with Geoscience Australia’s Nat Map 1:250,000 raster map, which can be superimposed over the street level base map. Zoom down through the Natmap raster map and underneath at the smaller scale appears a more detailed street map.
The top-of-the-line eXplorist 610 combines the best of on-road and off-road navigation. Built-in maps get adventurers from the doorstep to the road, to bush tracks, to remote locations and back. The eXplorist 610 includes three levels of mapping, Magellan’s World Edition base map Geoscience Australia’s Nat Map 1: 250,000 raster map plus the highly acclaimed Discover Aus Topo map, which shows the most detailed tracks in the country, contours and trails even in the most remote locations. Zoom in down through the Nat Map to the street level and finally down to the most detailed tracks shown on any GPS in Australia. By adding the optional Discover Aus Touring SAT NAV map, users can navigate their vehicles with full voice prompts from the built-in speakers through busy city streets on their way to their outdoor adventures.
The eXplorist 610 features a three-axis electronic compass and a barometric altimeter that provide precise orientation, accurate elevation information and enables for weather pattern tracking.
Each model in the eXplorist series also includes several innovative features, such as Magellan’s award-winning OneTouch favourites menu, enabling users to instantly access bookmarked locations, searches, and functions. The industrial design incorporates silent proximity alarms. And, to compliment the 3” touch screen, each device has two customisable hard buttons to take a photograph, mark a waypoint or provide quick access to a number of other preferred features.
The new eXplorist devices also include essential outdoor features such as expandable memory, paperless geocaching, GPX compatibility, 16 hours of battery life, high-sensitivity GPS enabling 3-5m of accuracy, vertical profiling, a digital almanac, track summary statistics and area calculation.
The Magellan eXplorist 510 GPS device with detailed street mapping and NAT MAP raster mapping will be introduced at around $599 and the eXplorist 610 including detailer street mapping, NAT MAP raster mapping plus Discover Aus Topo mapping at around $749. The units will ship with a standard mini USB cable and two lithium disposable AA batteries. With the purchase of a Magellan eXplorist GPS device, customers will receive a 30-day free premium membership to www.geocaching.com
For more information, visit www.magellangps.com or www.nextdestination.com.au
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