Lowrance iWay 500c
The iWay 500C is a monster of a GPS system. It weighs a staggering two pounds and is meant for full-time duty in your car. The iWay 500C doesn’t have its own battery, nor is it remotely convenient to carry around. Commensurate with its heft, the iWay 500C comes with two mounting solutions, including a very heavy friction base that we preferred to the less reliable suction mount.
Since it comes with a beefy 20GB hard drive, there’s no need to download maps to the iWay; 10GB is preloaded with maps of the U.S. and Canada, and another 10GB is reserved exclusively for music that you transfer from your PC with the included USB cable. The device supports both MP3 files and the less common Ogg Vorbis format. When used as a music player, the screen displays all the essential track and equalizer information, as well as visualizations or equalizer settings.
Audio quality is a bit thin by default, since it’s pumped through a tiny speaker built into a small gadget mounted halfway along the power cord. On the plus side, Lowrance recognizes you probably want to make this a fairly permanent part of your car and includes a wiring kit to connect the device to your car’s sound system. Best of all, you can listen to music and navigate to your destination at the same time.
Housed in a rugged, waterproof casing to protect internal parts from the harmful effects of moisture, the Lowrance iWay 500c comes in a gray and silver color scheme that works well with virtually any car’s interior. The unit’s centerpiece, a five-inch color display with a 320×240-pixel resolution and a responsive touch screen, is surrounded by a silver bezel with Speak/Volume, Map/Music, Menu, Find, and Power buttons situated on the right-hand side (see Features). Around back, you’ll find a six-pin power connector, a USB port, and a jack for an external antenna. At two pounds, the unit is a bit heavier than most on-dash devices we’ve seen, but the benefits of a large screen and a 20GB hard drive are a worthwhile trade-off.
In-car power is supplied to the device using a cigarette lighter plug. A speaker attached to this power cable delivers voice navigation commands, as well as music playback. Higher-quality playback can be achieved if your car stereo system has an Aux input. Combine this with an audio cable and you can connect the MP3 player to your in-vehicle sound system. In addition, Lowrance supplies a beefy AC power supply with a cigarette-lighter receptacle, so that you can plug in the iWAY 500C at home and transfer music files from your computer. There’s also a headphone (line-out) jack on the speaker that’s connected to the lighter plug; with it, you can attach an RF modulator to play the tunes back through an FM radio.
Included in the box is a suction-cup mounting apparatus and two swivel arms, one short and one long, to accommodate various mounting positions. The suction cup stayed attached to the windshield during a bumpy ride on the beach, but the unit itself looked like it might become airborne due to its weight. We adjusted the mounting arm to allow the iWay to rest on the dashboard, and all was well. Depending on your vehicle’s dashboard and windshield configuration, it may not be possible to position the iWay 500c so that it has a clear view of the sky, but Lowrance has that covered; a remote-amplified antenna with a small suction-cup mount is part of the package, so you can keep the iWay 500c close without sacrificing signal strength.
You also get a soft cloth cover to protect the screen when not in use, an AC adapter, a USB cable for transferring music files at home, a 12-volt car adapter with built-in speaker and volume control, and an auxiliary wiring harness for hooking up the iWay 500c to your car stereo system. The included cable attaches to the auxiliary jack on your car stereo head unit, which can be tricky and may require the attention of a professional installer; alternatively, you can purchase an FM modulator for around $40 to play your tunes through the car’s radio.
The Lowrance iWay 500c uses a 12-channel parallel receiver with WAAS (Wide Area Augmentation System) capabilities for enhanced accuracy. A 20GB hard drive holds detailed NavTeq maps of the United States and an extensive points-of-interest (POI) database on a 10GB partition; the remaining 10GB are available to hold MP3 or Ogg Vorbis audio files, which can be uploaded from your PC via the USB port. Unfortunately, the USB port is 1.1, so file transfers can be painfully slow.
The built-in MP3 player is quite a bonus—something we haven’t seen previously in any other aftermarket automotive GPS device. Loading your music files is as simple as connecting the GPS via a USB cable to your PC. After you do that, the available 10GB partition shows up as an additional hard drive; you then just drag and drop your MP3 directories onto the GPS’s hard drive. The MP3 player recognizes ID3 tags, so the artist name, album name, track title, track number, playing time, and encoding speed are displayed as the selection plays. Playlist management is fairly basic, though: You can select directory trees or even the entire partition to play or shuffle, but such advanced features as playing by artist, genre, and the like remain the province of dedicated MP3 players.
The five function buttons include a Speak/Volume button for adjusting the volume and repeating spoken directions; a Map/Music button for switching between navigation and music screens; a Menu button for accessing the setup screens, the trip calculator, and GPS status screens; and a Find button for searching through the POI database. Here you can also create routes from your address book, as well as find fuel, food, and lodging using the touch-screen icons, and you can search for locations by address via the virtual keyboard. Creating a route is as easy as touching the selected address or POI from a drop-down menu.
You also have the option of adding recent destinations and searches to your address book for future route planning and storing up to 1,000 waypoints with custom icons for easy identification. The fifth button is a power switch that also lets you choose between four backlighting modes for optimal viewing in various lighting conditions. We left the screen on the brightest setting and had no trouble reading the display in direct sunlight, and there was no noticeable glare.
The Lowrance iWay 500c’s interface is one of the best we’ve seen in a GPS device. We were impressed by the layout of the iWay’s onscreen toolbar and map-mode display. You can view maps in 2D mode in north-up (north is always at the top of the screen) or track-up (the map rotates to show your direction at the top regardless of your heading) orientation. You can also choose the 3D view, which is a slightly elevated aerial view of the map.
Touch-screen controls let you zoom in and out easily, and you can use the Zoom Box control to draw a box around a specific area by dragging your finger across the screen. Zoom Box shows detailed street-level information, a handy feature if you want to focus on a small area of detail without losing an overall wide map view. Tapping a POI or waypoint icon brings up specific information about the location, such as the street address, the phone number, and the coordinates.
Screen settings are comprehensive and easy to manipulate. You can choose which data elements appear on screen (distance to turn, time to turn, speed, altitude, and so on), as well their size (small, medium, large, or enormous—yes, that’s really a choice) and position. You can also choose the transparency level for the on-screen data elements (they can be opaque, blocking the map data below, or transparent enough to see the map data through them). A Collapse button on the lower right-hand side of the screen will even clear the map of data elements and just show the map.
As with all GPS systems, it takes a few minutes to lock on to enough satellites to ensure accurate positioning. The iWay 500C also incorporates a WAAS (Wide Area Augmentation System) receiver. WAAS is a supplemental satellite navigation system designed by the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). It boosts GPS accuracy to within about 20 feet. The main mapping/navigation display by default shows your current position and, if you’re moving, tracks it with a black arrow that moves along the streets on the map as you drive along the real streets. There are three different display modes.
By default, north is always at the top of the screen. One alternative, useful when navigating, keeps the direction in which you’re traveling always at the top of the screen—the map re-orients itself when you turn a corner. It’s hard to see how the third mode, 3D, could actually be useful for navigating. The most impressive aspect of the iWay 500C is the Find menu, accessible by clicking one of the keys on the side of the device. It gives access to all the different ways the product provides to find - and then navigate to - destinations.
You can use the on-screen keyboard to key in an address or two streets that intersect. You can look up a destination in an address book or a list of recent destinations. Most notably, you can find gas stations, hotels, restaurants and other points of interest, either by keying in a name or asking the iWay 500C to show you the nearest destinations in that category. In our testing, the lists were quite comprehensive—although, inevitably, some of the listings were out of date. Hotels and restaurants that had gone under or changed hands still appeared in the iWay database.
Once you’ve keyed in or selected a destination, you can click the Go To button and the iWay 500C automatically calculates the supposedly optimum route, generates a list of directions and starts feeding you audio instructions - “Go South on State St.,” “Turn left in .7 miles,” and so on. In our testing, the directions and visual mapping were extremely accurate and helpful. When you’re sitting at an intersection, the black arrow on the map representing your position is at the same intersection.
Written directions and other information such as heading, speed, and distance to your location are also displayed on the screen. While this may seem like an awful lot of information to cram on a five-inch display, you can adjust the transparency level of most of this information to keep the map visible beneath the text, or you can choose not to display certain data.
Like most high-end GPS navigators, the Lowrance iWay 500c lets you avoid certain maneuvers and roadways, and the autorerouting feature will calculate a new route if you wander off course. The use of touch-screen slider bars makes it easy to customize the map screen to your specific needs.
Tags: 20gb hard drive, audio quality, GPS Device, gps system, lowrance iway 500c, mp3 files, music menu, music player, power buttons, tiny speaker, usb cableRelated posts
Posted on August 12th, 2008 by admin
Filed under: GPS Device
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