Magellan Explorist 500 LE, not a lemon, but an entire bag of lemons.

by Bjoern
(Vancouver, BC, CANADA)

I own the Magellan 500le for about 1 1/2 years.
The good: It got me started with geocaching. I became an avid reader of troubleshooting forums and met lots of nice people.
I have actually read now a good number of reviews and talked to people. I will probably own soon a good GPS (Garmin).

The bad: uses 3 (?!) AAA recharchables that run out of juice in under 90 minutes with lowest light setting (tested several, including brands on average 900mA), changing them is annoying, as the holder is very cheap, the back cover has to be unscrewed. This is as well the main entry site where water eventually get in, after you changed the battery a few dozen of times.

The software/user interface is absolutely outdated and non-intuitive (I could never give it to a friend, without presetting all details). Boot-up is slow, responsiveness is sluggish at best. Yes, you can put a large 2GB SD in it, as advertised. Unfortunately the space cannot be used, max 500MB are available, supposedly as the receiver only has limited addresses for the memory (like in the 80s). Data transfer is a pain, as the cable allows two orientations, yet only one works. This was not mentioned in the manual. Not mentioned either: windows XP crashes often when the unit is attached.

The (outdated) maps are quite expensive, and yes if there is a color screen, you will want to install topographical maps.

Geocaching: the description with hints section in the included software only allows 16 or so letters, not even SMS length?!

Assembly of a file with your caches to be uploaded and the process are highly unnerving, buggy and not intuitive. Did I mention terrible tech support and lousy manuals? All this trouble has very likely reduced my potential geocache findings and hunts by at least 50%.