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TomTom One Review
The TomTom One is an entry-level GPS navigation system, that works pretty well, available in retail stores for about $300. But which to buy? Retailers display up to a dozen of these creatures, and not one salesman I encountered could say much that makes sense about the differences between them. Being a professional Open Source evangelist, the TomTom, with its modifiable Linux system, and its small size for use while traveling by air and renting a car, was appealing...
I recently bought a new Prius (to be reviewed in these pages soon) and eschewed the in-dash navigation system. Why pay $1000 to $3000 to be locked in to a system that isn't necessarily better than a $300 one, with hardware that isn't upgradable and no guarantee that software updates will be either affordable or available? For that price, I could afford to buy a new navigation system every few years, and benefit from technology improvements. Indeed, the in-dash screen in my new wheels can be made to connect to external audio and video inputs, and outputs touch-screen coordinates via the car's CAN bus. So, maybe someday I'd want to hack in a car computer and run GPSdrive or something similar. But right now, paying $300 for a Linux GPS is easier than investing the time necessary to put together a carputer. As a business traveler, I can even write it off on taxes.
The TomTom One has a 320x240 color screen that is visible enough - some advertise better displays for daylight viewing, but I can't be sure that any of them really are better. I am not having any trouble with the screen size - it's big and bright enough, and street names are easy to read. It does about what I'm used to from Hertz Neverlost (a Magellan GPS) although its menu system for street location is easier and its default map display looks better. It does a nice pseudo-3D rendering (of course there's no height-field data, so it's not real 3D), and is clearly readable even for its small size.
The speaker in that little thing is loud for its size. I paid a few bucks to customize the navigation voice - it's John Cleese! Cleese even manages to throw in some humor. The One doesn't do text-to-speech as the more expensive TomTom Go 910 does, and thus the navigation voice won't read street names, although it says things like "take the third exit in the roundabout", which is quite clear enough. You can glance at the screen for the street name, as the next turn or exit is always clearly indicated. I guess it said "roundabout" instead of "traffic circle" because I was using a British voice (one of the stock ones, not Cleese) at the time, although there are "yards" and "meters" versions of that voice. The custom voices are actually Ogg Vorbis files, and you can create your own after searching for some information on the web. Having a British voice configured here in California makes it a little easier to distinguish from the radio and other folks in the car, reducing driver overload. US, British, and Australian versions of English are available, and there are many other languages.
The GPS receiver is very sensitive, and has been the first I've owned to fully acquire while still in my garage with the door closed. This is facilitated by the ephemerides that can be downloaded to the device from the desktop, or automaticaly via GPRS in your phone using the TomTom's Bluetooth connection, if you are using any of their value-added wireless services. The ephemerides are good for a week or so, and during that time the receiver can acquire satellites with less signal than it would otherwise need. It's not clear whether or not the device is using WAAS.
Some TomTom models work as speakerphones and interfaces for your Bluetooth phone, the One just uses the phone for GPRS. I've not hooked up GPRS yet, and will have to get out the parameters for using my Motorola A780 Linux phone with T-Mobile, as that phone isn't one of the ones with out-of-the-box support. They should be the same ones I used to configure PPP on my laptop.
In some regions, TomTom offers real-time traffic display and warnings about traffic-ticket issuing cameras as a subscription option. There's also a "buddy" feature that can show the location of your TomTom-using friends, like the APRS systems that ham radio operators have had for a decade. In the San Francisco bay area, the local governments provide traffic data without charge as a means of easing the traffic woes of the region, and that's available to my flat-rate T-mobile GPRS connection via 511.org . Maybe that's a good thing for a carputer to do. TomTom provides a point-of-interest database useful for tourists and business people. It was able to tell me all of the museums within 15 miles of my location, and with a no-cost download would locate the Radio Shack stores, Target, Office Depot, etc. Gas stations are part of the stock point-of-interest database.
TomTom One uses an SD card for storage, so its storage is expandable. A map for Europe is available, but it costs so much that it would be less expensive to buy another TomTom One just for the map. The device connects to a desktop computer via USB, and appears as a USB disk. There is access to all files via USB, including the map. If there's DRM, I've not hit it yet, but perhaps the maps are encrypted. There is a management application for Windows, and one could be made for Linux easily enough. Although the map format is closed (and comes from a third-party, not TomTom), other files like menus and point-of-interest databases are either documented or easy to figure out.
The biggest complaint I have with TomTom is that they have been stingy with street number data in order to fit the entire U.S. database into one gigabyte. When I went to enter the address of a store on Mt. Diablo Boulevard in Lafayette, California, the TomTom offered to navigate to any cross-street, but did not have house-number data for that commercial avenue. I'd gladly give up several states worth of map data in order to have full street numbering for California, but TomTom doesn't offer state-by-state map management at this time, and their map format is proprietary. I have full street-number data from the U.S. Census, and would mege it in if I had data on TomTom's map format.
One remaining complaint is that the device can't be configured to power on and off with the car power. It'll run down its internal 2-hour battery if you leave it on. That 2-hour battery isn't really sufficient for a hike, but then that's not what the device is intended for. It's light and small enough to carry on a hilke and turn on if one gets lost.
TomTom One runs on an ARM processor, with 32MB RAM, and comes with a 1 GB SD card where the map resides. There was an upgrade available online for both the unit and its Windows desktop management program, but the desktop program stubbornly insisted that no upgrades were available until I replaced it. Replace that Windows desktop program with the upgrade if you use Windows, the version that comes with the unit isn't going to work well.
TomTom One is discounted to $300 at most retailers, and can be had for as little as $250 + shipping on eBay. The reason for the discount may be that a new model is coming out - the TomTom One XL, from information presented to the US FCC for approval, looks like the One, and has a mini jack connector for audio in or out, and perhaps more RAM, a faster processor, or the telephone interface features of the other TomTom units.
One caution to new car owners: I first used TomTom's $35 alternative mounting kit to attach TomTom to that odd little window in the left-front corner of my Prius. Then I noticed that there's a curtain airbag in the front pillar. Airbags are literally bombs, meant to counter the forces of an auto accident by blowing up in your face. In that position, TomTom could likely have ended up embedded in some portion of my anatomy, or that of one of the passengers, if propelled explosively by an airbag deployment. I relocated the unit after considering the airbag positions.