Great blend of function and affordability

Why I got it

I purchased this before heading off on a 10-day driving vacation; I selected this particular model after reading a lot of good reviews and seeing that I could get it for less than $300.

What's in the box

In the box is the unit itself (which includes a removable 128MB microSD card), USB cable, power cable, adhesive dash mount (optional use), software DVD, and an installation/setup poster (which I didn't need to refer to).

The unit itself

It's small and compact - the size of a kid's fist. It's got a ball-and-socket joint that attaches to a strong lever-operated suction cup which you stick onto the windshield (and they include a disc you can permanently adhere to your dashboard for the suction cup to stick to). Controls are simple and limited - a power button, a click wheel, and a 'Back' button. The click wheel's similar to scroll wheel on a mouse, you can roll it up and down to scroll through lists, and press it in to make selections.

Even though the screen looks small, once you have the unit up and running, it's definitely large enough and very easy to read both during the day and at night. The voice prompts are loud and clear (and you can adjust both volume and brightness, and map zoom).

Setup

This was pretty simple, essentially all you do is put in the batteries (2xAA) hook the unit up to your PC via USB, insert the DVD, and download selected parts of its north American map into the unit (there isn't enough RAM in the unit to hold the entire map - but that's one of the reasons it's so affordable!).

There are a couple of oddities regarding setup: first, the instructions warn you not to do as Windows asks when it first sees the unit connected, and second, there is a lot of stuff in the included instructions about using the 'unlock code' for the software, but I never was prompted for it and never could even figure out what it was supposed to be for. At any rate, initial setup worked perfectly for me.

Finding and entering destinations (which you should do before you start driving) was pretty easy, though sometimes the response time of the unit while searching for addresses was slow (but this doesn't happen while you're actually navigating, it's before while you're selecting where to navigate to; in other respects the speed/response time of the unit was fine).

I did initially think that there was no way to navigate to just a town/city/place without having to enter an actual street address, but after playing around a bit with the unit I did discover that it could be done.

Aside from not having to enter addresses when you don't have a specific address in mind, you also don't have to enter them when you're going to a hotel or a restaurant - assuming that it's in the unit's database. I think of the 5 hotels we stayed at, all but one was in there, making navigation setup easier.

Use while driving

Of course, the main thing you buy a navigation unit for is navigation, and it worked fine - we always got where we wanted to go, and as far as we could tell, usually by the most direct route. If you do stray from the route that's planned, the unit announces "recalculating" and in maybe 15-30 seconds has a new route mapped out, so you don't have to fiddle with anything while you're trying to drive.

Of course, there are some things that are left out on a unit this cheap; I've never used any other nav system so I probably would have had a bigger list if I had, but there are only a couple of things I would add if I could: First, it would have been nice (just for variety) to select a different voice, and it also would have been nice to be able to change the display so that it showed number of hours/minutes before arrival instead of showing the estimated time of arrival (the latter only was realistic if I drove non-stop, but on long distance all-day drives that didn't happen!)

Things that didn't work perfectly

1. In heavy city traffic on multi-lane roads, sometimes due to the combination of my speed and the map zoom, by the time I could see or hear whether I had an upcoming right or left turn, it was getting pretty late to change lanes. To me the easiest way to fix this would be to either have the unit announce turns a little sooner, and/or adding "right/left" to the text display that already shows the name of the road you'll be turning onto next.

2. Right after we crossed the border from Montana to Canada, although the road continued arrow-straight due north, the unit was convinced we were now maybe 1/4 mile to the west of the road - we could see the road on the display, but the unit though we weren't on it. This persisted for maybe 5 miles and my guess is it had something to do with screwy map data due to the US/Canada border.

3. One day, about halfway to our destination, on the correct route, all of a sudden the unit decided we had to diverge from what it had planned and wanted me to turn. I ignored it and it got back on track quickly.

4. The estimated time of arrival doesn't account for time zone changes; the unit always shows the estimated arrival time in your current time zone even though it (presumably) knows your route will cross into a different time zone. Unless you frequently drive into different time zones, you won't care about this!

Upgrading

As I mentioned, the unit comes with a preinstalled 128MB microSD card, which isn't enough to hold the entire USA. Although I probably will never take advantage of it, I purchased a 1MB microSD card for $40 and upgraded my unit so now it has the entire map in it. Although there were no instructions for how to do it, it was easy enough - the card slot is on the side of the unit and the software was perfectly happy to load the entire DVD map into the new card.