Pharos 150 Drive 3.5-Inch Touchscreen TTS Portable GPS Unit, Black

I purchased this item on a whim. It seemed like all my friends had GPS's, tho their's were more familiar brand names. I have to say that not only I, but all my friends also, are very impressed with mine. It does the same lor more than theirs, and it was half the cost. Horray for me, I did something right.

It works great for short trips, but must leave plugged into charger if you are making multiple stops or in use for more than an hour. works best when lift pugged into the charger.

I bought the Pharos's 150 because of its low price and the walk mode. It worked well for me for the first time. The second time I used it, it had an "desination.exe" failure and told me to shut if off. I did and was able to enter the address again. But it turned itself off after about 20 min while I was on the way to a new place. The unit would not turn on and I ended up spending 40 min more to ask around for directions and getting lost many times in light rain. When I got home, I charged it overnight and it still would not turn on. I called customer service and was told to reset the unit and it turned on. I was told that this happened because it was a new unit and once it had been used for a while, this would not happen. I never expected new things to not work well, my mistake!!! I used it for a third time and everything is fine. It does need 2-3 min to find the GPS signal (feels like 10 min). So I gave it a 3-star because you get what you pay for. While it works, it is good enough for me.

I've used the Pharos 150 for about a month now and its ok but does have some annoying things about it. First you have to depress and hold the power button for 30 to 45 seconds and sometimes longer before it will boots up. The screen is readable but not very bright. The screen is almost invisible with almost any amount of sunlight on it. Conversely at night it nearly blinds you even with "night colored " maps. One thing I find very annoying is that as your speed increases it incrementally zooms out. If you depress the zoom-in button it may or may not zoom in (no rhyme or reason to it). When it does zoom in, it will remain zoomed in for only a few seconds then zooms back out. At speeds around 45 or less it behaves quite well and responds to zooming commands as one would expect. Another annoying characteristic is the sensitivity of audio click for touch screen buttons. It will click at with relatively light pressure applied although the function will not activate unless more pressure is applied to the touch button. It forces one to look at the screen to verify that the selected function did in fact activate. Another complaint is that it tends jump the map in steps rather than scroll smoothly at highway speeds. Its like the processor can't keep up with the movement of the vehicle. The good side is the maps seem to be accurate (at least as accurate as my other two vehicles that have in dash nav units). Route calculation is good but a little slower than I like. All in all, for the price, it's an ok starter unit, but for a few dollars more better portable GPS units are available. As a side note, I have a Blackberry Curve with an imbedded GPS. I downloaded Google Mobile maps (its free) and it does an equal is not better job of displaying the vehicles path in both map and satellite modes. If only the screen was a little bigger..

this item is always searching for a signal and I am going to return it.