TomTom ONE 130-S 3.5-Inch Portable GPS Navigator
by TomTom
|
List Price: Our Price: $76.35 You Save: $32.64 (30%) Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours Buy Used: from $50.00 (click here) Category: GPS or Navigation System See more product details |
|---|
Customers in the UK,
Buy this product at amazon.co.uk
for British Pounds
Digital Cameras Photo Reviews of TomTom ONE 130-S 3.5-Inch Portable GPS Navigator
Customer Review: Great GPS, but a few things to consider...
Summary: 4 Stars
This is my first GPS. It fuctions as advertised, and so far, nearly every trip has been correctly mapped out by the 130S. Just a few notes to be aware of: There is only one voice option that will allow text-to-speech, which means that if you use another voice option or a downloaded voice, you lose the street name announcements. For me, this means I am limited to the one voice. That's fine with me, but if you simply must have Mr. T give you directions, you will not hear street names. Also, the text to speech isn't perfect. "Br" - which is how the word "bridge" is abbreviated on the screen - is always pronounced "branch" by the 130S. Also, some words are so far off their correct pronunciation that they are unrecognizable, such as "Goethals Bridge", which comes out "Goot - halls - branch". But the text-to-speech is generally OK.
My wife complains that the mount is hard to set on the windshield, and that it falls off. I have not had any problems with the mount.
I had to call to find this out, but the 130S will charge off a computer using the supplied USB cable, so you may not want to pay up for the AC charger option.
Recently, I was trying to find a street address in Brooklyn, NY, but for some reason, the 130S would not let me enter a house number. As soon as I entered the street name, it took me to the map. This only happened once so far, so I guess it's no big deal.
Features I find useful: The variable volume setting, which increases or decreases speaker volume based on your speed. It works well. The "home" and "recent destination" options are quick ways to set up the 130S, and allows you enter the destination at home, shut it down, then retrieve the destination once you're in the car. Screen is very readable (I don't see why a larger screen is useful).
TomTom customer support has been pretty good. You can get a live person quickly, and the one time I called, I got a knowledgable, courteous customer service rep.
Finally, the 130S is fast - it locks onto the signal quickly, and can recalculate quickly, too, which is great if you miss a turn.
The 130S is a great GPS and a great value!
Customer Review: Ok for the price, but not great
Summary: 3 Stars
I just moved to a new city with a new job that has me traveling, so a GPS was almost a necessity. I went with the TomTom ONE 130-S because of the price, and because reviews said it was a great value (once they fixed the volume issue).
The pros:
Screen is easy to read, computer voice is easy to hear and understand, portability is great (attachment folds up against the unit, there's no base unit in the car).
The cons:
Two major problems. Screens are easy to navigate, BUT, it won't accept certain address formats. Some suburbs around Chicago have addresses in the form of "111W22 33rd St", and it absolutely will not allow you to enter a direction (letter) in the middle of the number.
The other major problem is the program that creates the route. It does great getting you close to the destination, but when you get there, it will surprisingly often tell you to pass your destination, go a mile, then take you on a big loop through some other streets, ending up going back the way you came, finally stopping at your destination on the second or even third pass. It literally had me do a big, 3 mile figure 8 yesterday, passing my destination twice before it actually said to turn in.
In the end, I would recommend this model for someone who only wants to have it as a backup, who won't be using it all the time. It's inexpensive and usually works fine. But if you're using a GPS daily like me, you'll probably wish you'd gone with a higher quality model.
Update: a year later, I'm considerably less happy with this model. The suction cup attachment was only good for a few months before it failed to stay attached to either the windshield glass or the included disc to stick to the dashboard. The attachment is now totally useless, I have to leave the unit laying on the passenger seat and grab for it to look at it. The software is a pain, I haven't been able to update the maps online (granted, I give up after 20-30 minutes, which I think is a perfectly reasonable amount of time to expect to get the program to work).
Customer Review: No Speaker Problems
Summary: 5 Stars
Many people have already hit on the high and low points of this item. On making my purchase, I weighed the different complaints and strengths people pointed out of the TomTom, Garmin, and other brands. One of the major complaints against TomTom is the speaker. I had to send an XL (not the XL-S) back due to some kind of problem with Windows XP Home Ed. not wanting to recognize it either due to mechanical / hardware failure or something in the software. I'm not sure which. I took a chance that this newer version wouldn't have that kind of issue. I could hear the XL fine, as long as I wasn't blasting music but the difference between it and this model was staggering. The speaker on this one made me back up in the seat and feel like I was being screamed at when at 100%. It's very possible that particular issue with TomTom is hit and miss, but this one at least was extremely loud and clear.
It was easy to set up, gets me where I'm going, and since I was already spending $200.00 I went ahead with the Text to Speech. I need all the help I can get.
The voices you must use for Text to Speech are quite a bit lower than others (Tom and Samantha) so if you happen to have one of the poor speakers I could see this being a problem. As it was, I can hear them clearly and if I don't happen to need the road names the free downloads by community or provided by TomTom are even louder.
In testing it around town, it seems to take the routes I'm accustomed to 95% or more of the time.
This one found my home address from inside the house while plugged into the PC where I had to program the XL.
The packaging felt like I needed a hacksaw and Merlin to get into it, but I suppose in a perfect world we wouldn't have to worry about anyone stealing. That doesn't mean I enjoyed hacking through the evil that is known as the package, but I grit my teeth and endured. It's a small enough gripe and I'd rather have a working GPS once liberated than the inconvenience of whacking through the package.
Customer Review: Still not loud enough
Summary: 4 Stars
I picked this up for a cross country drive and it served that purpose very very well.
In the era of google maps and the iphone I often found myself expecting the device to allow me to slide the map around and easily search for places to eat in the area. It doesn't really do that, and isn't advertised as a device to do that. But just be warned that its easy to expect more nowadays.
This is a bare bones GPS that performed flawlessly for me in that regard. There were a few times during my trip when it might recommend going around the block to get to a street when it was easier to just cross right over to it, but thats a pretty normal thing from a GPS and was in no way a show stopper.
The audio is a problem. 1. The voice is too low to hear even over road noise, let alone while listening to the radio and talking on the phone. 2. When cranked to the max the speaker quality is so poor that what voice you do hear sounds like someone talking through plastic wrap. very distorted and very tinny. These complaints are well explored in other comments.
My other complaint is the way you enter addresses is not standardized to the way we enter addresses on the internet, its all a little backwards. First you enter letters of the state and wait for it to offer closest matches, then you enter the city and wait for it to offer you closest matches, then you enter letters of the street and wait for it to offer closest matches, then you enter the street #. Would be nicer if I could just enter the address with a qwerty touchscreen keyboard as a full address and let it narrow it down from there. Would save a lot of time. The term 'a lot' being relative of course.
The software is great, it updates easily. There's lots of other free voices you can download which is all pretty cool.
Give me a dual-touch slide UI and the ease of google maps for local searching and I'll buy it.
Customer Review: Things you should know BEFORE you buy...
Summary: 3 Stars
Although this unit has some great features, there are a couple of pretty significant misrepresentations in TomTom's advertising for the product that you should at least be aware of before making your final decision.
First, there is a considerable lack of available memory. TomTom advertises a variety of great features and options for this unit but, in reality, this model doesn't have enough memory for any of these additions. My unit has only the application, 1 map, 1 voice and the standard POI's and it is completely out of memory. I can't even update the map with any of the map corrections that TomTom promise because there isn't enough memory.
The other thing they advertise on this model is "Spoken Street Names." What they DON'T tell you is that, while there is a huge selection of different voices you can choose from, ONLY the 1 or 2 "Computerized" voices can actually read street names. So you really only have one or two choices for which voice you want to use -- all the rest of the voices can "speak" but can't speak the street/hwy names... which kind of defeats the purpose of spending the extra money on a text-to-speech model, in my opinion.
On the plus side, however, this is a very compact, easy to navigate unit and the Easy Port Mount is fantastic! This is where TomTom really surpasses any other GPS manufacturer. The mount is so small that I can put the entire unit (including the mount) in my pocket or purse and easily take it with me when I travel. Before purchasing the TomTom, I had to leave the mount behind when I traveled... it was just too big & bulky to bring with me.
So, as you can see, I still gave this unit 3 starts because it does have some great features. Really, the lack of memory is the biggest problem since it prevents keeping the unit updated with the newest information.