GPS Devices Life

Tomtom ONE 3RD EDITION Europe GPS Receiver Product 1N01.010 Key FeaturesDesignationOutdoorForm FactorFixedMap capabilitiesIn...

Bargain Basement and It Shows - Tomtom ONE 3RD EDITION Europe GPS Receiver My impression of the TomTom 3rd Edition (US) after living with it for a total of 4 months and approx. 10k miles dr...

Ever since I bought my parents the Garmin C330, I’ve wanted a GPS badly. I got the TomTom One 3rd edition because they dropped the price and I could afford it and I thought that since the TomTom was a well-known brand name, it would be comparable. I wish I had paid the extra 30 bucks to get the refurbished Garmin.

Firstly, the package was impossible to open, even with a pair of scissors. I understand that they want to avoid having people return the thing by making it impossible to bring it back in resellable state, but come on. I had to wait till I got home to open the box, seeing that I didn’t have a switchblade in the car. In comparison, when I bought the Garmin, the box opened easily so I could test it out before I gave it to my parents as an anniversary gift, and after using it I was easy to make it look as it hadn’t been touched.

Secondly, the mounting of the TomTom is ridiculous. It uses one suction cup that sucks to nothing, not even to the plastic disc that comes with it for mounting purposes. I tried to attach it to the window and it fell off. I tried to attach it to that disk and it refused to hold for more than 5 minutes. I put the GPS in a cupholder but it was so top heavy that it fell out and had a hard time sensing any sattelites. If your dashboard isn’t a flat surface, then you can forget about mounting even the black disk, not that it does any good.

I finally created a system where I have the GPS mount teeter out of a CD cubby hole in my dash, then I lock it into place by shoving my wallet, my cell phone, a pen and my lip balm in the same hole, just so that it will be so stuffed that the GPS can’t move. Ridiculous. And again to compare, the Garmin C330 has a suction cup that is reinforced with a latch to secure the GPS. The GPS will hang from the window and won’t come off until you want it to. Much safer.

Thirdly, there are times when I’ll submit an address and the TomTom doesn’t recognize it. I’ve only owned the thing for two weeks and more often than not, I can’t use it to find my way anywhere. Just tonight the TomTom led me down the wrong way on a one way street. After ignoring the directions, I found the location myself and it was a quarter mile away from where the TomTom told me to turn.

Again, the Garmin is wonderful. It is more intuitive and can almost guess where you want to go.

And forget about battery life. If I charge the TomTom to full capacity, it will only hold a charge for two days worth of driving, and I’m talking about a 15 minute commute, not a long extended trip. The Garmin on the other hand was always ready when I needed it.

The control panels on the TomTom are also horribly inferior. With the TomTom you have to tell the GPS when you want it to switch to night display. On the Garmin, it measures the light and will switch it for you. If you want to adjust the volume, there is a dial on the right side of the Garmin to change it quickly and without taking your eyes off the road. On the TomTom, you have to go into a couple of embedded windows, adjust the volume, push the test button, adjust the volume again if it isn’t close to what you want (and it rarely is) and then tell the computer to accept the changes. This half minute routine is pretty dangerous when you’re flying down the freeway at the speed of traffic, but find the volume disturbingly too loud. In fact, anything that you want to adjust is easier to adjust on the Garmin.

There are only four features that I liked better on the TomTom. On the Garmin you are required to type in that you agree that you will not make adjustments as you drive and it almost forces you to pull over if you want to make changes mid-drive (unless you agree to override the safety). This is a safety feature that I appreciate from Garmin, but that I must admit is annoying for the 1.5 seconds it takes to agree. TomTom does not make you agree. I guess they don’t care about your safety, since you can make all the adjustments you want as you ride.

The TomTom also has a way of showing you where the next gas station is on the map. This feature could have saved me a couple of times on my drives up and down the California coast. I don’t know if the Garmin does that, but if it does, I don’t remember the feature already being on when you took it out of the box. I like how the TomTom will not only tell you which direction you’ll be shifting to next, but it will also tell you the next turn after that so you can prepare. This is very helpful on city streets. As I remember from the Garmin, it only tells you where you’re going turn by turn.

Although this is an excellent feature in the TomTom, it can also backfire. As I drove a 30 mile stretch from Anaheim to Burbank on I-5, the TomTom was chatting incessantly for me to “Stay on the right, then move to the left lane”). It was telling me where to go every single half mile, even though it was pretty clear that if you stayed on I-5 you wouldn’t have problems. I finally had to go into a couple of menus to mute the GPS- this while driving 80mph to keep with the pace of traffic.

Lastly, the TomTom is smaller and easier to hide in a glove compartment than the Garmin. Although that hardly makes up for the deficits of the machine, it is technically a benefit- which I never use. Quite frankly, if someone stole my TomTom, I wouldn’t cry. It would motivate me to buy the Garmin C330, the GPS that I love so much that yeah, I just might marry it.

All in all, if you want a reliable GPS that is the epitome of intuitive, then get a Garmin. If you want to get a cheap GPS that will satisfy your wanderlust, get the refurbished Garmin C330. Just stay away from the TomTom One 3rd. edition, or you’ll be like me: sorry.

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