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Great price! Good features. Can be as simple as you wish it to be...almost. Awsome first unit. Nuf said.

Bought this unit to try out a mapping unit after having 2 Garmins and a Magellan w/o maps and I must say I am impressed ! Battery life is triple that of my other units. Accuracy is just as good as my units that I paid twice as much for. The maps are pretty basic low to medium detail but I wasn't looking for high detail maps. I have mapping software for that. This unit has many more features than I expected and is a great buy for the money.

Given that I am a mostly "weekend" hiker/geocacher, and then not all the time, I thought this simple, inexpensive unit would fit the bill.

You could say this is the Kia, Hyundai, or (to use a more recent example) Chevy Aveo of GPS receivers. It is the least expensive one you can buy new at a store or a dealer; stores sell it for about $75-80, and some Web vendors have it for as little as $60-65 plus shipping. It costs so low because like the cars above, it is designed to be basic; there is a decent basemap of major roads and the coastline, you cannot add an external antenna, and you cannot really upload/download waypoints, etc. (some sites have hacks that take advantage of the NMEA port on the bottom of the unit, but it will void your warranty).

But inexpensive really means "basic" here, not "cheap". The reception is the best I've seen in an entry-level GPS. Even without external antenna capability, I can get a position up to about 5 ft. from the windows of my condo, and this is inside the 1st floor of a 7-story building! With an external antenna in my Whistler I still started losing reception about a foot from the window. I also get a position in the cupholder of my car, which many entry-level basic units can't do. This unit also has WAAS for enhanced accuracy of position and I get it at least half the time! The maps are basic, but you do not get any maps on the entry-level Garmin or Magellan unit. And they include shipwrecks and have decent coastline detail (Lowrance began as a company that aided in marine navigation).

Battery life is awesome! I have put about 6 hours use on my first set of batteries, and it still shows full. I put in Energizer Lithium AA and they lasted for almost a year!

This does not mean that this is the GPS for everyone. The lack of full street maps and very small screen means that it really is not a great car unit, however, it is not impossible to use in a car, it does show some major streets in addition to the Interstate, US, and state highways and you will get a reading on your speed. And the inability to upload/download will drive someone who is constantly changing waypoints crazy, like someone who goes to several geocaches each week/weekend.

And though it seems to fit the need I have for it right now, I cannot give it 5 stars on two counts. The first is that I think the screen is a little too small, even for hiking/caching use. The second is that if you've never used it before, the menus/buttons are not terribly intuitive and can be very confusing. In this vein, the unit only comes with a basic instruction manual and does not tell you have to read and/or download the full manual online. The full manual makes this unit a LOT easier to understand.

Nonetheless, if you are a boater or hiker and have never used a GPS, or if you are just beginning to take up the hobby of geocaching, or you are on a tight budget (or any combination of the 3), you cannot go wrong with this item.

Pretty basic black and white unit; screen is hard to see in bright light situations. I'm going to sell it and upgrade.

The I-Finder GO, at $79, has a lot to offer for a bare-bones unit. It has a 16-channel, WAAS capable receiver which usually locks onto the satellites in one minute or less (assuming you have not moved more than about 100 miles from the last position with the unit turned off). A full cold start, where the unit has to re-orient itself after being moved several hundred miles or more, is still quite fast, maybe 5 minutes or less. The unit can be set to "require" WAAS in calculating it's position; this results in all positions and track points being generally accurate to 7 meters or less (With WAAS disabled, positions can be hundreds of feet off if satellite DOP is high).
The GO can usually get and maintain lock even inside wood frame buildings, automobiles, or under tree cover. Readability of the display is best in full sunlight, otherwise, the backlight offers two brightness levels. Battery life is excellent, and the GO uses two standard "AA"'s. The GO has a 4-pin serial output port for NMEA-0183 I/O so it can "talk" to other NMEA devices such as a chartplotter or autopilot. The unit can also be powered externally through this port by a 3 volt DC adapter (*DO NOT APPLY 12 volts TO THIS UNIT!*)

For only $79, there are obviously some features that the I-Finder GO doesn't offer. The most noticeable are the lack of removeable memory and the lack of a USB or RS-232 port for data transfer of Routes, Tracklogs, and Waypoints. The built-in basemap of the GO offers only major state and federal highways, andn only a few county roads and primary city streets (usually with no names). The built-in road map includes ONLY the Continental US and Hawaii; it DOES NOT include any road details for Alaska, or any part of Canada.
One other caution about the GO: panning the map and planning routes is very slow. The price you pay for excellent battery life is a very underpowered map display processor.

If you need more features, the I-Finder H2O may be a better choice. The H2O and H2OC use SD flash card memory to store extra mapping detail and record user data like track logs, so they are expandable, whereas the GO is not. Lowrance's add-on maps are about the same price as Garmin's - around $100 gets you the MapCreate DVD for the US, There is also a set of MapCreate CD's for Canada, also priced at around $100.

One other note about Lowrance I-Finders: The track logs (actually called Trails by Lowrance) contain the horizontal position ONLY, and do not include the elevation or time/date stamp for the track points. If you need your track logs to contain these extra data fields, you may want to consider the Garmin GPS models (E-Trex Legend/Vista, 60Cx, or 76Cx) instead of the I-Finder.