Lowrance iWay 350c GPS Automotive Navigator Review

The Lowrance iWay 350c is an automotive GPS navigation device. Lowrance Electronics is fully owned subsidiary of Navico marine electronics company, a well known for its fishing and marine equipment, such as depth recorders, fish finders, and marine GPS devices. Automotive GPS is a new field for Lowrance however, it promises much given the company heritage.

Siblings to the 350c are the lower specification Lowrance iWay 250c and higher specification Lowrance iWay 500c and 600c. The iWay 600c has marine mapping/navigation capabilities in addition to automotive GPS navigation.

A 16-channel parallel receiver has WAAS (Wide Area Augmentation System) capabilities giving the Lowrance iWay 350c enhanced accuracy to within 3 meters. Only the 250c doesn’t have WAAS capability.

The 350c has a touch-screen display with voice and visual turn-by-turn directional guidance. It has a large 4GB internal hard disk drive providing for NAVTEQ maps of the United States and an extensive points-of-interest (POI) database.

Display

The iWay 350c has a 3.5 inch (89mm) diagonal, 320×240 resolution display bright enough to be readable when in direct sunlight. The display is the same size as the 250c but smaller than the 5 inch (127mm) of the 500c and 600c. It is LED backlit as with the 250c as opposed to the cold cathode backlight of the 500c and 600c.

There are a number of options for map display including;

two dimensional (2D) – vertically down,
three dimensional (3D) – aerial view from a slight angle above,
north-up – north is always at the top of the screen,
track-up – where the map rotates to orientate the current direction of travel towards the top of the screen,
zoom – allows full screen zooming in,
zoom box – activated by dragging a finger of the relevant section of the display, zoom box reveals a box of detailed street-level information without losing the overall wide map view.
contour lines – elevation contour lines can be displayed

A promising display option feature is automatic zooming out and zooming in response to speeding up and slowing down respectively. Another handy feature is the ability to adjust the transparency of information displayed, for example heading and speed, to produce an acceptable level of visual clutter.

Other Controls

As well as the touch screen, there are five buttons with functionalities as follows;

Speak/Volume – volume adjustment or repetition of spoken directions,
Map/Music – switching between navigation and music player interfaces,
Menu – access to setup screens, trip calculator and GPS status screens,
Find – POI (points of interest) database search, route creation from address book, search for locations by address (via a virtual keyboard), adding recent destinations and searches to address book and adding up to 1,000 waypoints with custom icons
Power – selection of one of four backlighting modes for varying ambient light conditions.

Other Functionalities

Certain undesirable driving maneuvers and particular roads can be eliminated from routing instructions.

Auto-rerouting calculates a new route if the user happens to wander off the given course.

The 350c can wirelessly stream music and voice directions through any open FM radio channel eg. car radio

Audio Player

The audio player will recognize MP3 or Ogg Vorbis audio files which can be transferred from a PC via the USB port. It should be noted that the USB port is slower 1.1 version. There is a digital media card slot for loading music with an SD/MMC memory card

The iWay 350c’s MP3 player features include;

an equalizer,
scan and shuffle modes,
a file explorer,
MP3 playlist support
Skin changing – skins can download from Lowrance’s Web site or transferred from a PC.

iWay 350c Specifications

Display

Sunlight-viewable, 16-bit color TFT touch-screen display
320H x 240V pixel resolution
3.5″ (8.9 cm) diagonal display
Super-bright, LED backlit screen

Navigation

built-in, precision 16-parallel channel GPS + WAAS receiver
simplified operation with 5 primary keys
Maps can be updated through the internal USB port with a PC
Three selectable mapping displays: 2-D Track Up, 2-D North Up, and Elevated 3-D
Preloaded, detailed and highly accurate NAVTEQ turn-by-turn database for the continental U.S. and Canada
Turn-by-turn audio and visual cues, including auto-zooming and automatic recalculation of directions after a missed turn
Street address searching, plus auto-routing choices to choose or avoid Toll Roads and Interstates, and avoid Left-Hand Turns
storage for up to 1,000 waypoints
Safety Passenger Mode allows a passenger to use the GPS features while the car is in motion

Music Player

Key music functions include: Browse Files, Play Lists, Repeat On/Off, Shuffle, Equalizer, Pause, Stop, Scan, Skip Forward, Skip Reverse, and Volume
Built-in FM modulator to wirelessly stream music and voice directions through any open FM radio channel

Other

4GB hard disk drive card preloaded with NAVTEQ maps of the United States and an extensive points-of-interest (POI) database.
4.52″W x 3.54″H x 2.55″D (11.48cm x 8.99 cm x 6.48 cm)
Full one-year warranty
Integrated Speaker
12 vDC plug power adapter for power and recharging – note: 500c and 600c have 110VAC to 12VDC power converter for in-home use (transferring music files, etc.)
volume control
1/8″ stereo jack
Suction-cup mounting bracket for windshield mounting
USB to PC interface cable