Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I've enjoyed this new car navigation system for a week and decided to return it. As you may expected this unit has very good graphical interface. In 2D and 3D mode, the displayed map is always beautiful. In the view of performance, this unit has a kind of reasonable performance. Recalculation of route is fast enough. At least the speed is same as that of its competitors. GPS reception is also good, I think it has the newest SiRF III chipset and it guarantees superb reception performance. Free traffic monitoring is one of the best features of this unit. I think lots of people (including myself) buy this because of the free TMC. It works pretty well. 3D view of freeway interchange point is also helpful. But, in spite of these superiorities, I decided to give up using Navigon 7100 because, 1) Well known (?) memory issue. Mine has 2GB legacy SD card, instead of 4GB faster SD card. I've never tested the performance difference between the two SD's. But I think they will show difference. Even though I can assume the difference is very small, 2GB memory has too small free space for upgrading or user data. Simply, I don't want to buy 2GB with 4GB price. 2) Although the GPS reception is good, it takes too much time for it to initialize the system. It takes 3~5 minute to get the GPS signal after turning on the device. Even you are in the opened area. (If it gets signal once, it can keep the signal pretty well. That's why I think the reception is good.) This is too painful. I have to spend such a long time to start the navigation. You know, I can drive fair amounts of distance in 3 min. If I drive to wrong direction in this dead time, I have to spend more time to get back. This is very annoying. 3) The awkward routing algorithm. Sometimes, it makes me lot of turns even though there is a straight road connection. If there are several parallel roads, it always designates a specific road to drive, in spite of the efficiency. Because there is no traffic information for the local road, occasionally, it guided me to the most jammed road. if I drive away from the jammed road and take another parallel road, it always keep saying "go back to the jammed road" (even though there's no difference in efficiency between two paths and two paths are parallel) sometimes, it picked up a very weird route regardless of the routing option. It will make your travel time doubled. 4) The awkward rerouting by traffic monitoring. Free TMC is definitely the best feature of this device. But this feature sometimes makes the trip time doubled. Let's say you are at point A. You have to drive to point C, 10 miles away from A, through a freeway. But from point B, 9 miles away from A, there's heavy traffic and totally jammed. Then the fastest way to drive to C is taking the freeway and drive to B, then taking locals to C. -But if Navigon gets this traffic information, it will guide you just local road and avoid entire freeway sections. If the freeway is long enough, maybe it redirects you to freeway. But it guided me to locals from Santa Monica to LA downtown and avoided 10 miles whole i-10 section. That was 9:00PM and there was a slow traffic at very near the downtown. This is nonsense. To avoid this situation, when it notifies you the traffic, you have to check the map very carefully and decide to avoid or ignore. You have to do it, while you are driving, even in 60+ miles. That may kill you. I think Navigon has tried their best, but still not enough. Definitely, it has some superiority over its competitors. But, also it has very critical bugs that can make you very nervous. I think you'd better wait though it's very attractive. You can buy this after they fix lots of bugs other users and I suffered. Don't be a beta tester of Navigon paying more than $500.