To let everyone know, I’ve owned this product for over a year now and only now have I been compelled enough to write a review.
I bought this unit on sale during Black Friday at a local office supply store. The price was a steal at the time ($100) and it came with lifetime traffic alerts for life. I pulled the trigger and got it. Initially, I was in love with the Navigon. The lane assist feature was really helpful and let me know what lane to be in early enough to avoid driving like a jerk. The traffic features worked, decently, but as I commute weekly from San Diego to Los Angeles, there’s really only one way to get home, so I haven’t really gotten a chance to use the feature.
All was fine and well with the unit, but let’s just say, you get what you pay for.
UI:This unit is extremely underpowered. It is just too slow for what it can do. The buttons on the touch screen are extremely small and have a ridiculous amount of lag time. I’m an iPhone owner and even then did I have trouble entering street names. This unit just doesn’t cut it in terms of ease of use and intuitiveness. I often found myself punching a letter twice only to find out 2 seconds later that it didn’t even register. Bottom line, the touch screen needs a lot of work. On top of that, menus are not user friendly and require lots of backtracking to get to the screen you want. Not a very smart implementation, especially if you are on the go.
Navigation: Now, I will say that this unit does have it’s up sides, but there are many more downsides. The text to speech is decent, it doesn’t sound that robotic and pronounces most of the street names decently. In terms of the actual navigation, again, this unit is just too underpowered. Let’s say I miss a turn. This thing takes two blocks until it tells you where to turn, and by the time it tells you to turn right, you already overshot the turn by half a block, leaving it to recalculate again. The unit got so confused at a point that I had to pull over and wait for the unit to finish thinking before I could go any further.
The traffic feature is good, but if you’re in a major metropolitan area, it recalculates “due to traffic information” every five minutes. If you’re going on a long trip, say over 75 miles, the unit can take up to 20 seconds to finish recalculating. By then, you could have missed the interchange, costing you valuable time, and not to mention gas.
Overall, this is a satisfactory unit in this price range. However, I wouldn’t recommend this unit. Sure you save a few dollars, but it’s not worth the headache. Like I said before, you definitely get what you pay for with this unit.
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