Good GPS. Fairly fast routing. Good directions.

I bought the Navigon 2100 about three months ago before going on vacation, and I've been impressed with it's performance. I bought it to replace a simpler Lowrance iWay 250c GPS I had been using for about a year. The Navigon 2100 has text to speech, and at $149 the price seemed reasonable. Since my exposure to GPS's has been only at the low end of the GPS price range, maybe some of my observations will be obvious to users of higher end devices.

The Navigon 2100 has a 3.5" touch sensitive display, and only one button on the case, the on/off button. The case is shiny black, thin and sleek looking. It can easily fit in a shirt pocket. When turned on, from a cold start, the Navigon 2100 takes about twenty seconds to boot and up to a couple of minutes to determine it's location. Warm boots are almost instant, but it can still take a minute or so to find its current location. Once the location is determined, it never lost its lock on satellites while outdoors. Even in my home, a two story wood frame building, it can get a location on the ground floor.

The Navigon 2100 comes with preinstalled maps and points of interest for only the lower 48 states. At the introduction screen, there are only five choices to make; New Destination, My Destinations, Take Me Home, Show Map, and Options. When you thing about it, that's a pretty logical group of choices, and they work pretty much as you would expect. New Destination lets you enter a new destination, either a city and state, street address or intersection, or point of interest. My Destinations lets you select from destinations you have already entered. Take Me Home will route you back to a default location that you have designated a home, and Show Map does just that.

The New Destination page is easy to use if you know the address of your destination. You can enter the address, city and state first, or by street name and number. A small alphabetic keypad appears on the screen and you tap in the information once character at a time. It's surprisingly fast and as you type each character, the Navigon 2100 narrows down the choices so that you can frequently navigate to the desired street name or city entering only a very few characters. When the desired name appears on the list of choices, tap it, and continue to the next field. It's simpler to do than it is to describe the process.

The Navigon 2100 is able to create a route fairly rapidly. It's definitely faster than the old Lowrance GPS. Add to this, the fact that the Navigon 2100 speaks route numbers and street names, and it makes it easier to navigate in urban areas where streets are likely to be close together. One other feature of the Navigon 2100 is that on interstate highways, it shows a preview of what an upcoming interchange looks like. At first, I thought it seemed too gimmicky, but I've been surprised at how realistic, and useful the view is.

One other feature I like about the Navigon 2100 is that since I bought it, they've made two firmware updates available. They were easy to install, and have improved the usability of the GPS. On update greatly improved the routing algorithms, and the second update included an updated map of the United States. The updates were provided at no extra cost, and were easy to download an install.

One other feature that is offered by Navigon is the ability to buy with a one-time $99 charge, instant traffic updates. The Navigon 2100 also has a receiver for these traffic bulletins, and the $99 fee buys you an activation key for service. I haven't purchased the service, but if I lived in a metropolitan area where major tie-ups are a fact of life, I might consider it.

I have two beefs with the Navigon 2100. The device has a touch screen, but there's no stylus for tapping on the screen. I can use my fingers on the screen fairly effectivly, but I think a stylus would feel more comfortable. My second gripe is the placement of the power adapter. It uses a standard USB mini plug, and it's located on the bottom of the unit which means there's almost no way that you can stand the GPS on edge with the power adapter attached. It would have been much better if they would have added it to the side of case.

The Navigon 2100 comes with a sturdy suction cup window mounting bracket. While simple, it's well made, and doesn't vibrate easily. The GPS also comes with a plastic mounting disk that attaches to the dashboard for those states that prohibit the use of windshield attachments.