November 9, 2006

Review: Lowrance iWay 250C

The Lowrance iWay 250C was recently announced and has been doing well in the market as a value GPS that has a lot of nice features in a great flat form factor. While the unit is small it's not small on features, including a 3.5 inch touch screen, pre-loaded maps on the unit for the US and Canada, as well as more than 4.5 million Points of Interest (POI). We reviewed the Lowrance iWay 350C last year and found it to be very customizable in terms of the amount and type of data you wanted to have displayed. The iWay 250C is similar, and has the ability to load up or slim down on the data fields.

The unit features the ability to leave a bread crumb trail, similar to almost all the handheld GPS units out there. I would love to be able to to this, as I have been in several situations using other units where I simply want to backtrack, but the unit is unable to give me the exact same route home from my original destination; I know weird.

Craig Ellison over at PC Mag has taken a look at the unit and likes the navigational aspects and the customization capabilities of the unit. He was less than impressed about the route calculation times, saying "My biggest disappointment with the iWay 250C, though, came from a totally unexpected quarter—lengthy route-generation times. I took the iWay 250C with me on two road trips. One trek was from New Jersey to Cincinnati, and the other from New Jersey to Bartlett, New Hampshire. The route to Cincinnati took nearly three minutes to generate, and the one to Bartlett took over 2 minutes. Other competitive units generated the same routes in under 30 seconds. That is a huge difference."

But overall thought, "I like the iWay 250C. At $349, it's an unbeatable value. And if configuring your map view to match your preferences is important to you, the iWay 250C, like other Lowrance products, is the best. If route-calculation times had been in line with the competition, and it provided better access to its POI database, this gizmo would be riding on my dashboard now."

He's got a lot more to say.

ReadMore on the Lowrance iWay 250C at PC Mag

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