Navigon 2100 Max review

Next, there's a new safety tool called DirectHelp. It's similar to the "Where am I?" feature on the Garmin devices, as it lists your exact coordinates and provides you with the location and contact information of the closest police station, hospital, pharmacy, or roadside assistance. While phone numbers are listed with the entries, the Navigon 2100 Max is not equipped with Bluetooth, so you can't dial out directly to these services.

As for the basics, the Navigon 2100 Max comes packaged with an SD card that's preloaded with maps of the continental United States (lower 48 states) and branded POI. The 2100 Max also works with the Navigon FreshMaps--an add-on service that provides up to 12 map updates over a three-year period for $79.99. For more about the navigation features of the Navigon 2100 Max, please read our full review of the Navigon 2100.

Performance
As we noted in the Design section, the Navigon 2100 Max suffers from some of the same performance lags as its predecessor. There's some delay between the time you tap an icon on the screen and the time the system actually registers the command, and unfortunately, it also affects some of the navigation calculations.

For our road tests, we took the Navigon 2100 Max out in San Francisco, and from a cold start the receiver was able to get a fix on our location within a quick couple of minutes under clear skies, while subsequent starts were almost instantaneous. The unit did a good job tracking our position as we drove around the city; not surprisingly, the 2100 Max briefly lost the signal as we drove through the Broadway Tunnel but was able to quickly reestablish a connection when we exited the tunnel.

As usual, we plotted our trip from the Marina District to CNET's downtown headquarters. Once we entered our start and end points, the Navigon 2100 Max started off strong by quickly calculating a bulk of the route, but then it got hung up at the end. In all, it took about 10 seconds for a complete itinerary, which yes, isn't very long, but a little slow compared to other systems we've tested.

We checked out the route list before starting on our drive and found them to be accurate. Once on the road, the 2100 Max provided clear voice-guided directions; the text-to-speech was pretty decent and didn't mangle too many pronunciations. We missed several turns to test the route recalculation rate, and we're happy to report that the Navigon 2100 Max fared better than the Navigon 2100. While not lightning fast, the system was able to get us back on track in a timely manner and the new routes were efficient.