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| Review written by Duffmaster from Santa Clarita, CA I researched this unit for a long time and finally decided to purchase one. I still have not done the update yet, but my friend has one and he did and he said it was a nice improvement. The update takes 2 gigs, so your left with 3 gigs of file storage on the hard drive.
With that said lets get down to it then, for the price you can't beat this unit! I got it in the box and the thing looked brand new!! It says it is refurbished but I think someone messed up because it was flawless, everything in the box looked new and even smelled new. It gets me where I need to go, that is the first and most important thing. Now, because this unit is hard drive based, it does take a bit more time to calculate a route then a flash based navigation unit, but this really does not bother me. If you have a car made of metal, this unit will have problems finding a signal if its not at the window. If your car is plastic it seems to have no problem finding a signal anywhere in the car. This is my experience at least.
Now I took this thing down to LAX International Airport and it had no problems getting there. On the way back the ladies in my car had to use the restroom so I told it to find the closest Denny’s. It found it and so I went off the 405 freeway to this horribly designed city. This is where one complaint comes in, and it could just be the area. Where I was had so many streets crisscrossing and curving it was madness. I don’t blame any navigation unit that gets scared and doesn’t know what to do. This unit found Denny’s, but it did have to recalculate a few times because of all the streets running around. The people at Denny’s said the girls could not use the restroom unless they paid, but that is not the navigation's fault.
I also took it up north 200 miles to San Luis Obispo, it had no problems there. Whats kewl is the POI functions. I can search by zip code, phone number, and coordinates, type of food or recreation, and much more. I wanted Italian so it found me an Olive Garden 4 miles from my location. Because I dirt bike a lot, often times the places I go don’t have addresses so looking it up via the coordinates is awesome. Once there I can save my exact location and give it a name, so next time I can find it in my favorite list and click it and BAM! It will take me there. That’s what I call service.
Yeah, so I cant change my curser to a hippo or a police car like the Garmin nav units can, but I also don’t have to pay another 200 bucks to do it. I like the fact that I can store music or videos on an SD card or the built-in hard drive and play them back. It has a 3.5mm headphone jack so I can hook it up to earphones or my sound system. So as the music plays through my sound system, it still gives me directions and warnings which is awesome.
OH, and another kewl thing, when you search for, lets say your friends house, it will find it and pop up this screen with a red curser. Sometimes, the house number you put in displays your friends house being 4 houses away from the actual location. This is not the navigation's fault, it’s the map provider. My house is in this situation, google maps and map quest both list it as being 3 houses down from the actual location. So with this red arrow I can click the true location and save it or have it travel there. This is nice so if someone else uses my nav unit and try's to get to, lets say my house, which I have pre-programmed in it, it wont send them 3 houses down because I already corrected it. Now, if they were to type in my address manually and not use my pre-saved function, it would send them 3 houses down. For the most part, the map database is really good and it has not led me anywhere that did not exist.
I will stop talking now. So let me sum it up! For the price you just cannot beat this unit, I got it in the box and the thing looked brand new!! It is slow to calculate and find a signal sometimes but it depends where you are, and it is hard drive based which is why it can be slow. But again, price! I would recommend this to a friend, and I have. In this economy, not all of us have 300 bucks for the latest Nav system. So when you need to get from point A to point B, this does the job just fine. I like this unit! |
