TomTom ONE Portable GPS Vehicle Navigator Review
September 26th, 2009
TomTom ONE Portable GPS Vehicle Navigator Review from Bill Barrick. Great little device but needs a few fixes…, This is my first GPS (not counting the Delorme Earthmate which is too antique to compare). So I’m impressed! There’s a lot to like here given that I wanted a basic “no frills” device.
The One boots up and fixes within 1-3 minutes probably depending on how much open sky it can see. The unit recalculates routes in seconds and I’ve only run into the dreaded “turn around when you can” advice once. The SirfStar III chipset is a big improvement over what I read about older devices. I love the suction-cup holder–it’s amazingly steady and hasn’t come off accidentally yet (helps if you wet it a little). The voice and speaker quality are very good although I don’t see much impact of the “link volume to car speed” function. The navigation is accurate but you do have to be careful–the One has already tried to lead me into a restricted area of the Pentagon! It also calculated a route that took me off a highway and immediately back on just to take advantage of 1.5 miles of unrestricted HOV. As with any advice based on old data, things can change–so be careful. Another caveat is that the Tom Tom One is a popular item for theft–hide it well or take it with you. And don’t leave the suction-cup holder showing–the bad guys will break in to see if you left your One in the car.
I also really like the fact that the device contents are on an SD card which makes backups easy and straightforward. And the connector is a 5-pin USB so I only need one cable for it, my camera and my PDA. And I love the fact it’s running Linux–that gives me all sorts of ideas.
The maps are a little wanting–I’ve got about 20 Favorites built up and it failed to find house numbers for some buildings built in the past 2 years. In fact, one restaurant it didn’t find as an address it did find as a pre-installed POI (point of interest). So I have no idea until I drive there whether the POI it knew about, but couldn’t find as an address, might be an old location for that restaurant! Which points up another perplexing oddity–you can’t view the address details of saved routes–you can only rename them or delete them. They need to fix this.
One disappointment is that the emulator is not working for me. That’s the part in the PC or Mac (PC in my case) client that gives you a direct interface to the device. Tom Tom has been working with me on this and the Help Desk has been very good and answers within a minute or two, but it is a disappointment. Tom Tom says it’s almost certainly something in the client that’s not supporting that function and are promising I’ll see an update to the PC client that fixes it. I think I believe them (well, the first half of the statement anyway) given that the PC client appears to be a quick kludge of the older client for the more expensive models with the unsupported functions (MP3 player and image viewer) dimmed out when the client determines the device is a One. I hope they fix this soon. Most tasks can be completed on the device itself (at greater inconvenience) but one or two can only be done through the emulator. Until they fix this it’ll be tough to deploy this to entities like sales forces that need to quickly enter the day’s routes and itineraries before getting on the road.
Another odditiy is that the client keeps wanting to download and install the prior (beta) version of the device Operating System. Oh well, rushing tech to market means they get to use us as beta testers. I guess I’m getting used to that.
All in all only one star lost for the problems with the PC client. Now someone needs to start a U.S. Wiki!
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