First off we wish there were other reviews before we bought our two units, as my experience is basically the same as others. That is the unit will work in a limited set of conditions to determine water depth, but dont believe the fish finder! As a toy its great when you aren't catching fish, but at $100 there should be more than that! Summary: Pros are its a great concept, looks and feels sturdy, and nice graphics on a larger screen, easy to cast and lots of neat features like the fish finder alert. Cheaper than the competition. Cons are poor battery management, software implementation, and inconsistent syncing (hint bring the USB charger and portable 5V batter in your tackle box if you really want the best performance) This review covers two separate units, the first we bought and returned to amazon, the second to/from walmart. We tried a second one as the first one had such awful problems with connecting we couldn't believe it was systemic, turns out the second worked a bit better in some areas, but IMHO the product still needs some work and better software. For example when using it to 'map' a cast it shows the farthest (deepest) part of the map as zero on the scale, and the nearest to shore as the farthest on the graph. Very non-intuitive, you want to know the distance a hole or bump/object might be and fish to avoid it, cant do it directly from the displayed scale. Unit one was purchased after new years and tried in both a fresh moving stream and shallow water lake in texas (its warm enough to fish down here year round.) the unit attached easily to a small brass type snap swivel but not to the heavier stainless steel types I favor and would be more secure. I used a 6.5 ft medium action rod with 20 lb test (no way I was going to lose this to a weed) but its buoyant nature keeps it from getting hung up. It was very easy to cast and retrieve across a medium sized stream and the first time we tried it it synced with my 4s with no problems It would report when it was out of water "ibobber out of water" and its depth readings seemed accurate enough, though its limited to 3.5 feet it seems as a minimum. we cast it about 5 or six times at a variety of spots to play with the settings, check the consistency of readings, turn on the blinker, check the water temperature (probably within a few degrees of being correct) and then stored it back in its sleeve in the tackle box. The battery still read 100% even after 30 minutes of toying around with it. We know there are fish in this creek, saw some on the surface, and have taken out 3 lb cats, but nothing on the fish sonar screen. Also note to self that 3.5 in iphone screen in direct sun not good way to visualize the readings Next challenge was a 5 acre stocked lake that we went to the next day, we rigged up and put the ibobber in the water to turn it back on, but no joy. It would not sync with either my iphone or nexus seven, which is a much better size to use with this product. Returning back to the house we tried every tip we could find, finally placing it back in its charger over night, and that solved the problem - except that it was supposed to retain its charge when out of the water, not run itself down to zero with no indication on the battery indicator. Thus ended the life of unit one and Amazon took it back. We got unit two a few days later and tried it out extensively in the house first, in both cold water and warm water 'baths' Its amazing how many fish this thing will find when its in a cup of ice! This second unit would reconnect over a days time period so we set out for a large power plant lake to compare it with a low end Hummingbird fish finder on our boat. First thing you notice is that while it worked fine in calm water, dragging it behind a boat, even at trolling speeds just makes the unit unreliable. It could match the depth readings of the boats unit fine one second, then the next be finding fish at 72 ft, or 36 ft, or 8 ft all in an 18 ft cove. We stopped the boat more than once to fish for some of these phantoms before we gave up and stayed with the built-in unit. We did tie up next to some trees in calmer water to do some head to head, generally the depths were the same, but the ibobber saw fish where the hummer didn't, and when they both 'saw' fish they never agreed on the depth. The ibobber would go from fish to its weed symbols alternately and we kind of lost faith in it. We did put some small hooks on the back end of the unit and turned the 'strike' alarm on but even the smallest movement would trigger it so we turned it off and decided it wasn't ready for the boat and the big lakes just yet. We tried another lake that was known to be full of fish, and fished the crappie barn at lake Somerville. Here the finder seemed to work well inside the fish barn and in very quiet water. It showed all sorts of fish that could have been fish or weeds since we were fishing over some sunken trees, but nothing was biting, except small bass at the surface. We took it out to the back cove and put it on 'fish finder' mode since if one is constantly staring at the screen one is not seriously fishing, and we found this to be the best mode for using it. Also all the other fisherman liked playing with it as well, but after only 2.5 hours of fishing the battery indicator went from 100% to 70% to 30% back to 35% to zero and just died. So if you want to use it in fish finder alarm mode you need to seriously down rate the expected time you might get from it, but unlike the hummer on the boat this will not last a full day of fishing, yet. Our last experiment was to take it back to the first shallow lake, freshly charged. It worked fine casting from shore and we could get about 50 ft out every time, farther than we could bait cast into the breeze. While this unit seemed to work better its 'ibobber out of water' alarm never worked like the first unit, and we conclude there may be some deeper issues in the manufacturing side...???? I have been contacted by OEM and told there is a revised version of Ibobber with battery battery life and physical connector. Will test out this third unit and update review accordingly - Feb 20 2015
