General Question.

Warren,

I think you are using the Hema for everything other than what its prime purpose is.

Firstly, there is no "lady living inside" when using OziExplorer for off road use.
Ozi is a moving map display of where you are at any given point of time, displayed on selected map.

Route 66 is a voice guided navigation application, primarily for city and built-up areas, although can be useful for major country towns. The "lady who lives inside" can be very helpful in city navigation uses, but may be less helpful for little country towns, depending on the update level of the iGo street maps at the time.

The Hema 5 is a little dated now and an upgrade to a 6" or 7" model will give more features, but generally utilise the same maps. The Hema 6/7 comes with the full set of Hema Australia maps, plus some good regional maps of our Country for certain areas such as the desert maps, Kimberley map, etc.
The Hema is still (IMO) the best for off road use (OziExplorer) to indicate where you are a any moment, with the ability to same your track data and waypoints along the route taken.

iGo is a pretty ordinary street navigation application for the Hema and as it can't run at the same time as OziExplorer, is all but useless to me.

I use a separate device for street use, but also run it when touring as I find it useful for country towns and other points of interest. My 4 year old TomTom has recently been upgraded to a Garmin unit, but interestingly, Karen (the lady who lives inside) has moved from the TomTom to the Garmin device, in the Australian Garmin models.
I have also purchased the OZTopo offroad software to run on this device and will create a blog on how useful I find it, although again, the City navigation app must be disabled to run OzTopo, so it could be interesting to compare its real usefulness.

As to your last question, replacing a portable device with something like a VMS unit will give you a larger, built-in navigation device, but will provide no real gain over a portable unit for navigation purposes. Maybe it will give more functionality for all those other bling things that come with both the Hema and the VMS units, such as reversing camera display and hands free phone use, but I use mine purely for the primary purpose of Navigation and have separate devices for reversing camera (built in to the reversing mirror) and Hands free phone operation though an OEM feature of my vehicle.
Oh, and for the rare occasion I need an alarm clock, the one contained in my iPhone, suits me better.

FYI: Our two sons and ourselves use a double din VMS box installed in the dash of our cars and running the standard street navigation that comes with the box and WindowsCE version of Oziexplorer for off road navigation. Personally we rarely use the street navigation. The radio is on the weak side but we have plug ins with enough background music to fill a few days, or we play DVDs/CDs

Just a small point on terminilogy. Forgive me if you already know this. Okay!!

GPS is short for Global Positioning System, and it is quickly becoming an integrative part of our society. It is a worldwide radio-navigation system formed from a constellation of 24 satellites and their ground stations.

A better term for the boxes or application would be satnav.

Thanks for replying guys here goes,
Oziexplorer doesn't work, gets as far as loading maps then that's it no further.
Route 66 (street / city ) no voice.
Red light / speed Camera alarm yes is probably out of date now but I use it in the truck weekdays, ( been handy and saved me a few bucks ) but now only works sometimes.
my computer is windows 8 and Hema 5 only talks to windows 7.
You are probably right update to latest hema, Hema 5 has been good and we have used it in the outback a lot. I know where i'm going but its nice to know whats around me.
Cheers Warren