26 out of 26 people found this review helpful.
Lots of Bang for the Buck
Date of Review: Jun 14, 2007
The Bottom Line: Great buy for the money. Great for personal use, not much on professional needs however.
I have used several GPS units, from a GPS engine on a laptop to Garmin and Philips in-dash units and dash mount units.
I picked up the Tomtom One on QVC during one of their specials for $299.00. This came with a carrying case, power kit for car and home, and mount. Technically it resembles most units on the market for a standard setup, as taken from the spec sheets:
- High sensitivity GPS chipset
- 32MB RAM
- CPU 266 MHz
- 3.5 inch full TFT color LCD touchscreen
(320 x 240 pixels, 64,000 colors)
- Internal Litium-Ion battery (2 hours operation)
- 3.8 x 3.2 x 1 , 6.5 oz.
- Operating temperature: 14?F to 130?F
- Bluetooth 2.0
The unit is surprisingly small when you unpack it, not much larger than a deck of cards or cigarette box. You can actually stick this thing in your shirt pocket when using it for walking directions.
The screen menu is easy to use, and navigating through will not take long to learn. Once you set it up for your preferences it is a breeze to use. Just touch the LCD, choose the function and navigate through the menu.
GPS acquisition is pretty fast and accurate, taking an average time of less than a minute to lock on initiating the unit and even faster coming from a tunnel or bridge where the signal was lost.
My initial impression of the graphics for mapping were not that good. In fact, I truly like the Cobra map much better as it resembles, well...an actual map. The Tomtom graphics resemble more a video game than a map. And the detail is not nearly as good as Cobra or Philips.
But the detail is there as you pass the streets and the moving map is OK, but I would prefer a much more detailed map that showed me better where I was, where I was headed, and how to get there without any audio if I chose to shut it off. The Tomtom graphics are not nearly this detailed.
The audio portion is a blast and Tomtom offers many voices to use, male, female, celebrity, English accent, American English, and many other foreign voices. A nice unexpected surprise. All of this stored on a small memory chip that you would use for almost any camera or computer. So adding info is a breeze by simply beefing up the chip size.
You can play with the map color scheme as well, with a nice choice of several backgrounds and patterns. Day and Night modes are available as well.
One thing I dislike is the way it steers you in different situations. For example, it knows that a lane is splitting left and right on the freeway ahead. It you need to stay left and keep in the right lane, or it may just say "turn left ahead". This gets confusing because one should understand the differences between stay left and turn left when driving. Especially when your next exit is off the right lane, in heavy traffic this made me lose my turn off a few times. But again, this software is from a European based company and this is how it is done elswhere than here.
Points of interest. Now THIS is where Tomtom needs much improvement. The unit has hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of them stored in its little brain. The issue is, when you type in for example "Holiday Inn", you may get 15 of them within one city as in Kansas City. No "Holiday Inn Express", or "Holiday Inn Airport". What the unit does NOT give that other units give, is the address and area of those hotels, causing you to hit each one and try to get the address. Cobra has a nice way of showing you the entire hotel and city, as well a phone number as you scroll so you know exactly which to hit if you have a street or neighborhood to choose. This will do the same with restaurants or gas stations. It will give you the miles that you are from said place, but no address or phone info, and only an address when you choose one off the menu.
So I dislike this for every day travel where you would use this function all of the time. It would come in handy in a great pinch, but sort of lame the way it is setup to be utilitarian for travel options all of the time.
The menu allows you to use this unit for walking, bicycling, or driving so as to get you there the best way possible. A nice feature seeing some units on the market would have you walking the same 5 One Way streets a car would take to get you simply 100 feet around the corner. And the unit is small enough to use for this.
The small battery inside lasts me on average 1.5 hours before charging again which I can do via my car adapter, a wall adapter, or my favorite...a USB connection on my laptop or computer. Sweet.
The Bluetooth function works well, but ensure if you plan to use this to not have a cell phone provider such as Verizon that blocks many other Bluetooth hardware to force you to use their traffic and weather and such.
Those functions work as well, but in my opinion are just snazzy distractions that are a day late and a dollar short.
But aside from Play Station looking maps and a so so Point of Interest function, for just under $300.00 you can still have decent navigation, so at the very least you will not get lost, or find your way out of a place not familiar.
I think the GPS and portability are every bit worth the money and hope that Tomtom has paved the way for other units like Garmin and Cobra to bring their prices down. Otherwise they have some serious competition.
If using for personal travel here and there, it is great. If using for work, deliveries, or really heading into unknown cities where exact mapping is preferable to the Tomtom representation, go with another unit.
But for under 3 bills, c'mon. Even the things I mentioned are bearable for what the rest of the unit gives.
