Can anyone provide me with their opinion on maps for this unit. I have read a little about navionics and lake master, but not exactly sure if one is necessarily better than the other.

Everyone has their own opinion on those, here's mine. I have run both in my Humminbirds and I would never go back to Navionics. The Lakemaster chips give you much more control and many more options than Navionics. The detail on the lakes I fish is better also. Lakemaster all the way for me.

LakeMaster offers some really cool customization features. And they just announced the NEW MidSouth Region that covers Texas. This will giver you alot more information and examples of LakeMaster: http://www.dougvahrenberg.com/LakeMaster.html

I have both and prefer the Lake Master, the new Lake Master editions have many more lakes than they used to and the best feature (in my opinion) is that you can adjust the lake level with Lake Master and Humminbird. This feature is not availiable with Navionics.

Do you know when version 2 will be available? The water level offset looks really useful. Will the version 2 be compatible with the humminbird 587 ci di?

Version 2 was released for 2012. The Newest Version is the MidSouth v1 which increased the area of coverage to add Louisiana and Arkansas.

Gotcha. Thanks.