So today I saw that Staples had the Navigon 2100 for $149 and I had a 12% off coupon bringing it to 132. So, I decided to give it a try as it is a bit cheaper than the Garmin units. I was surprised that Staples had it, so I bought it. It came with free lifetime traffic alerts which was a pleasant surprise. After using it for about 5 minutes, I’ve decided that the unit is a piece of crap. First off, I crashed it by ejecting the SD card, second the navigation is awkward, third the unit is very slow when tapping anything, fourth, the POI database with over a million POIs is quite small. It couldn’t find the local Costco that has been there 7 years. Overall, I was quite disappointed with this and will be taking the unit back tomorrow.
However, it reaffirms my research that the nüvi is the unit to get. I should have taken it as a warning that the Navigon website lists that it is running Windows CE. Frankly I don’t care what it runs as long as it runs well. It has a 400 MHz processor in it and it seemed slow as molasses in January (of course, somewhere cold).
Oh well, I’ll just bite the bullet and buy the nüvi.