Good value, but not without hiccups

Overall, I'd say I'm satisfied with my iWay, but not thrilled. I've had it for over a year now, and I've noticed a few quirks, some major, some minor. But when it works, it works.

One problem is that it often takes over 3 minutes for the unit to start navigating, and in areas with large buildings, it can be nearly impossible to get the proper signal strength to orient itself for the first time with the satellites. This means if you don't sit there and wait and instead you start driving, it may take up to 10 minutes for your directions to be synced up with your location. On shorter trips this renders it essentially useless. My friends' GPS units are all much faster than that, and I've seen the difference when both mine and a friend's are in the same location.

Once it's linked to the satellites, however, I have few major complaints. It's generally pretty good at choosing routes. You'll have to play with the settings that allow you to choose a tendency to send you down highways vs. side streets to optimize it for your area but once you're done with that it's pretty good.

The fact that it plays music and displays photos is neat, and you can add ANY size SD card to it, despite it saying a max of 512MB in the documentation - so it's pretty cool now that you can essentially turn it into a 4GB MP3 player with the big SD cards out these days. However, I've found that when you're using the built-in FM modulator to make the music come from your car stereo, the problems acquiring and retaining a navigation signal get much worse. It seems to me that it doesn't manage power usage within the device well.

I bought this when it had a major price advantage over some models from Garmin and TomTom, but since then, pricing has become more competitive and that gap has shrunk. If I were making the purchase again, I might pay what is now a smaller premium for what are probably more matured or full-featured devices.

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Lowrance iWay 350 gps

Unit works well but the manual shipped with the unit was for the older software. I checked the Lowrance web site for an updated manual but there wasn't one. The differences in the new software took a while to figure out. If a correct manual were available I would have rated the unit 4 stars.

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Good but need improvement

I used it for 2 months. In general, it does work but it does not take into consider highway. I guess it is trying to take you the shortet route. Sometime you have to drive around & around to get to get to the shortest distance. Also I still have not yet to enter the address using route 1 (us-1: highway, local...). It is still too slow to find your current location. I normally get in the car and go. You need to wait for it to find your location first(around 2 minutes) before you start the trip.
The device froze 2 times in NYC. I tried to use it in NYC to get to NJ. I did not follow the original direction to avoid toll road and the device froze 2 times I tried it. I guess it is because NYC has too many roads.

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