This is the first foray for me into GPS since using an old Delorme bulky unit and a laptop nearly a decade ago. Thus, I am a novice.

However, this unit exceeded my expectations on a spring break trip. We were able to quickly find restaurants, motels and sites of interest. We had no pre-plans for our trip but adjusted on a day by day basis. We would choose a destination and then look for the points of interest in IWay and found a lot of interesting sites.

UPS dropped off the unit right as we were leaving on our trip (whew, just in time), so we didn’t have time to check out usage ahead of time. Luckily, the batteries didn’t require a precharge. We plugged it into the lighter outlet and away we went.

At first I thought the 3D perspective was a gimick but soon embraced it as my prefered view (you experienced GPSers probably already knew this). However, I did find myself loosing directional perspective. There probably is a way to place the compus on the screen and keep the 3D perspective, but I didn’t see it. This normally wouldn’t be an issue since my car has a compass, but the rental used on the trip did not.

There are so many things I liked about this unit that would take me to long to write here. I’ll try to address the stuff others have not or reinforce where needed…

I actually liked the photo display capability. We could review the photos taken during the day. Sweet!

It was so easy to pop out of the tray and take into the hotel or restaraunt stops and review our next destination. “So what food are you in the mood for?” or “Where do you want to stay tonight?” I never had a moment where the batteries were low.

We could quickly find a list of attractions from our location. If exhausted or none left that interested us, we would find another town and then search for the attractions close to it. When an attraction interested us, we hit the goto button and away we went. We could include multiple destinations by either detouring or making it the new final destination. It was so simple once we got a hang of it.

A friend of ours has an original equipment GPS unit in her new Volkswagen. She always has to ask for the address of the destination. In our case, we would use the name or type of the point of interest to find our destination. Our method is much easier, quicker and more natural than what she has to use.

Contrary to one poster, the unit did not bounce even when set up on my four wheel drive pickup. According to the instructions, you have to make sure the unit sits on the dash as well as attached to the windshield.

There were a few glitches. Like others, the unit did shut off for no reason. This happened three times over the 10 day trip. I just pressed the power button and it looked like it rebooted but then it continued where it left off.

Several times, the final destination was on the opposite side of the street. No big deal since we could easily see the error. It did give us something to chuckle about. After a while we had to give the pleasant female voice a name which was Gladys and eventually became Glady. “Wrong, left Glady!”

Some other destinations just weren’t there. We would pretty much exhaust the area point of interests or “Attractions” so there were bound to be mistakes. In one case we were searching for a specific restaurant but it turned out to be a different one. In another case we were going to a war battlefield and found nothing but an outhouse. These were more times for us to rib Glady.

I tried to access the unit from my laptop running Windows XP, but it would not show up as a drive. I still haven’t figured out why this doesn’t work. I checked the Lowrance web page but couldn’t find anything in support that even mentioned this unit.

I did notice their sales page says something about the data can be updated but I couldn’t find any details how such a thing is accomplished. Since the POIs were really useful for us, I’m interested in how to keep it up to date. But then again, this unit cost us less than $400.00 and by the time we need an update, we will probably opt for a newer unit.

I didn’t try the MP3 player other than the sample songs included on the hard drive. I didn’t have time before the trip to load some songs. The speaker on the unit was quite impressive given the size. Using the FM output was great, but I found myself using the unit’s speakers so I could listen to the radio at the same time.

The route preview went too slow and I couldn’t seem to get the fast forward to move much quicker. Thus, this feature didn’t seem real uselful. Instead, I found myself either zooming out or even better dragging the map. Yes, I could quickly drag the map with my finger. Another unexpected feature.

Pointing the point of interest icons on the screen often took many attempts because of the fatty finger issue. It seems that icons directly over the route could never be highlighted.

The keyboard defaults to alphabetic, but I surprisingly found it much quicker when setting it to qwerty. The keyboard toggles between upper and lowercase and numeric/symbol. I couldn’t find a comma, however.

Overall, this unit is very impressive regardless of the price. I don’t really know how it compares to other units as far as feature or ease of use. The high prices have kept me out of this market. But at less than $400.00, it was simply amazing on our trip.

I would highly recommend this unit!