NaviGadget

Lowrance iWay 350C review

Jun 5, 2006 gps navigation, lowrance, reviews

The market is moving more and more away from pocket pc-based units and towards the All in One navigation systems. Lowrance has had the iWay 500c out for a while now, and their newest offering is the lower-priced 350c, which lists for $499.

The Basics

The 350c has a 3.5 inch display, a 4GB hard drive and an SD slot. Aside from basic navigation it can also display pictures and act as an mp3 player. One very nice thing is that it has two internal batteries for a claimed 15 hour run time. I haven’t tested this, but I have run it for 5 hours and it indicated that it had plenty of juice left. According to their literature the 350 has 5 million points of interest. The map database of the entire US and Canada is by Navteq and it is 3Q 2005, so it is pretty current. The Nemerix chipset is WAAS enabled and I often locked onto WAAS when none of my SiRF III units could do so. It has a very loud internal speaker and can also interface with your FM radio with a built-in FM modulator – a very nice touch. The unit uses a specially made mounting bracket with a strong suction cup, which has withstood the Northeast winter and the heat of the current spring season. The display is bright and is visible with polarized sunglasses. The unit comes with a USB cable and a fabric cover.

Unlike some other units I’ve seen the 350 will play music while navigating. The player will play OGG files, as well as mp3, for those who are into open source!

Operation

The first thing one notices about the unit is that it comes with a 10 page Getting Started Guide and a 68 page manual. Thank you Lowrance! It is a real pleasure to see a manufacturer paying attention to documentation. Unlike some other manuals I’ve read the documentation is clear and easy to follow.

Starting the unit up takes a bit longer than some of the others I’ve tried. It seems that the chipset is a bit slower in getting a lock than its SiRF competitors and it definately does not like to get a lock while moving. Do not attempt to get a lock after you drive off. The chances are that it will never lock and you’ll have to pull over and wait a while for it to lock onto the satellites. If you wait a bit before leaving then you will experience no problems. The chipset is not as sensitive as SiRF III and has a definate problem keeping a lock in challenging environments, such as New York City. I found that a re-radiating antenna was a necessity for driving around the city. For “normal” use, however, you should experience no problems at all.

There are no buttons and everything is done on the touchscreen.

At the upper left you will see the little icon that will open all the menues when touched. Below this is a speaker icon. Touch this and the volume control will appear. If you touch the screen below the speaker icon the zoom panel will appear. The 350 has its own default set of zoom displays. The faster you drive the more the unit will zoom out. At first I found this a bit disconcerting, but I’ve gotten to like the default zoom levels which are farther out than what I’m used to. At 80 mph it zooms out to about 11 miles, and this is actually pretty neat for seeing everything that is around me.

That brings up another point. The 350 has more detail in its maps than any other unit I’ve ever seen. Lakes, ponds, streams, mountains, cemeteries, etc. As a matter of fact I found the level of detail so incredible that it was quite distracting at first. It’s really neat!

By the way, everything is customizeable on this unit. You can elect to show or hide 18 different categories of things on the map, and each category has many subcategories that can be shown or hidden. For example, you can elect to show or hide restaurants, and then within the restaurant category you have 14 types of restaurants you can show or hide. Another example: you can show or hide political boundaries, and within this category you can show or hide city boundaries, country boundaries, county/parish boundaries and state/province boundaries. The 350 is a gadget tinkerer’s dream.

Let’s take the lower right direction pane as another example. You can add or subtract any of the fields shown on the display above. By my count there are 34 fields that you can pick from to include in this display. Not only that, you can then go into the interface setup and set the transparency level of the display, and the font size of each element.

Using the 350

The display is bright and you can display your route in 2D North up, heading up or 3D.

The route is marked on pink and is easy to see, as in the screen above. Unfortunately I can’t get screenshots and have to use a camera to get these pictures, so I can’t show you the turn display (not even for GPSPassion am I going to try to take a picture of a unit while I’m driving) but the display is easy to read and pops up in plenty of time to be useful. One extremely nice thing is that if you lose satellite lock, instead of just showing a dead screen the display immediately defaults to turn-by-turn text directions, so you are never left in the lurch. Good thinking! The unit has some limited text to speech capability and will pronounce road numbers of major roads, exit numbers and some simple street names. I must admit that I haven’t quite figured out when and why it does this.

Routing is pretty standard and has all the usual options (prefer/avoid toll roads and interstates and avoid cross traffic turns) and re-routing is fast. It has a trip calculator and will display and record plot trails. You can store up to 1000 addresses in a custom address book. When you reach your destination the program will tell you what side of the street your destination is on – something too many programs fail to do.

The 350 allows routing through waypoints and you can auto-sort the waypoints so that the 350 will calculate the shortest route among all of them. I wasn’t able to test this, but otherwise waypoint routing works just fine. The unit will also simulate a route so you and plot a route and then have the 350 run through it to see what will happen when you drive it. One very nice point is that you can reverse and replay parts of the route that might be a bit complicated. Another nice feature is that the 350 will allow you to detour to another point while driving and then resume the original route after the stop. For example, if you are driving a route and then hit Go To, you and have the unit navigate you to an intermediate location and once you arrive the unit will then navigate you from that location to the previous destination. For example, you could be driving to Point
A and want to stop for lunch. Just hit Go To and find a restaurant. The 350 will take you there and then resume its navigation to Point A after you start driving again. Unfortunately, however, the 350 does not have an avoid function so if you need to avoid a particular part of a route yu will have to do it by setting a waypoint.

The Points of Interest seem pretty complete and up to date in my area. But this doesn’t mean anything about the area where you live!

They are contained in a 3-tab interface, as you can see above, and its pretty easy to pick out what you want to find as the categories are well designed. I find that everything is pretty finger-friendly, as below:

but people with fatter fingers may have a bit of trouble using the on-screen keyboard to enter names of streets and POIs. By the way, you can actually customize the screens of the 350 and the Lowrance website has some new “skins” that you can add.

Bottom Line

If you can see from the tone of this review that I like the 350 you are correct. It is a very nice machine with plenty of features and would make not only a great starter unit, but a great final unit as well. The list price is US$499, but given the street price I think that the 350 is the best bargain in AIO GPS units available today. The major drawback to the unit are the reception problems in difficult areas, but a re-radiating antenna is a cheap way to help this out (see my review here). By the way, we have good forums dedicated to the Lowrance units so you can pick up some more information there.

Highly recomended.

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