Usually updates are free if you buy them within a certain amount of time. For instance if you bought 6.1 today, you'd "probably" get a free upgrade to 7.1, but everyone's policy is different. Also, cost is natually based on demand. There are a lot more Tom Tom units than Toyota Nav systems, so the cost is going to be somewhat higher. As mentioned, $250 is not bad for a car nav disk. Many are higher.

I always get amused with map coverage dicussions. In North America, there are two companies, NavTeq and TeleAtlas that do all the coverage for EVERY unit. The individual vendors can use one or the other, or a mixture of both, but the core data is the same. As well, vendors can choose not to licence certain areas or functions, but a TeleAtlas map is a TeleAtlas map. Toyota (Denso) doesn't do too bad actually. They licence the icons for POI's and display them (unlike Garmin that doesn't display them), as well as phone numbers and addresses which some units display, some do not. (each function is a seperate licence). Another thing you can hit is what one company calls a 2007 map may be another companies 2006 map. They are always behind due to compile time. The maps just being released are the "2006" maps, but some companies will call them 2007. I even saw one "2007" map that actually used the 2005 data, which would of course affect the coverage.

Later!

Dang