6. Using the TomTom ONE

Figure 36: The Navigate to... menu

Check out these icons - puts the Garmin interface to shame! Tapping "Navigate to" from the main menu brings up the screen above. From here you can choose to navigate to a saved address (favorite), a street address (address), a POI, Home, a recent destination, or even a lat/long coordinate. You can also choose to navigate to a POI near your destination.

Figure 37: The Navigate to... sub-menu

Most of the time you'll want to navigate to an address. After you tap on Address in the above screen, you are presented with this menu. You can choose to navigate to the center of a city, a zip code, a cross street, or a street and house number.

Figure 38: TomTom Tips

For those of you across the pond: if your destination name has an umlaut or accent in it, you don't need to type that in. For everyone else NOT traveling to Koeln, disregard this.

Figure 39: Spelling out a name

Once you've told the TomTom ONE you're navigating to a street address and chosen the state, it's time to spell out the street name. As you type, possible matches are listed in the top area of the screen (above the alphabet). A nice additional feature is that when you return here to enter an address next time, the recently found street names are already listed for you.

I found touch-typing on this screen worked well, although I did notice that the system was not quite as zippy or responsive as the TomTom GO 910 (very likely due to the 910's 400 MHz processor speed compared to the ONE's 266 MHz CPU).

Figure 40: House Number Selection

The next step is entering the house number on the street. TomTom has also added a nice option of including the "Cross street" option here, in case you don't know the exact house number.

Figure 41: Do you need to arrive at a particular time?

I actually quite liked this feature. If you don't want to be prompted each time about an arrival time, you can disable this feature (in fact, the ONE will automatically ask you after 3 trips if it should continue to ask you if you want to arrive at a particular time.

If you tell the ONE what time you need to be somewhere, as you drive the screen shows how many minutes early or late you will be. If you're there early, it shows +(number of minutes). If you're going to be late, the ONE shows -(number of minutes) in red text. My only complaint was that the estimated arrival time fluctuated wildly based on my current driving behavior. In other words, if I drove 80 MPH for 1 minute, my arrival time would drop as if I was going to drive 80 MPH the whole time. It seems that the sampling interval is too short in this calculation, and that the ONE is not taking average speed of travel on the streets in your itinerary into account.

The Garmin c550, for example, does an amazing job estimating your arrival time; so good, in fact, it's spooky. Even on a 4 hour trip, the c550 tells you almost to the minute what time you'll actually arrive. Friends in the biz have told me that this is due to the fact that NAVTEQ mapping data includes the average speed people drive on any given street, making it relatively easy to know exactly how long a trip will actually take.

Figure 42: Calculating Route

Route calculation on the ONE was fast, although not quite as fast as on the TomTom GO 910. Keep in mind, however, that the GO 910 is 60% more expensive than the ONE, so it's not really fair to compare the two.

Figure 43: Route calculation complete

Once the ONE has determined the route, you are presented with this screen. From here, you can press Done and start navigating right away, or you can press Details and take a closer look at the chosen route.

Figure 44: Route Details

Pressing Details in the previous menu brings up this screen. From here, you can view the maneuvering list as a text list, a map, turn-by-turn images, etc. It's nice to be able to easily view the chosen route as a complete list. On the Garmin StreetPilot models you have to click through each turn, making this process much more tedious. I really liked this feature, although I wished the ONE would just start routing you without making you press "Done". If I want to see the maneuvering list, I'd rather just tap the screen and bring it up that way, rather than have to press "Done" every single time I enter an address.

Figure 45: Map View

Here you see the main map view. This is what you see when you are navigating somewhere. As you can see, the map is rendered in a 3D aspect. It's nice to see that TomTom shows you the GPS signal strength -- something the Garmin StreetPilot series does not do. At first I thought the 3D angle was too steep, making it difficult to process the information, but once I got used to it I actually really liked it. TomTom's got a great looking interface -- I especially liked the night mode display. It's fun to watch -- you feel like the captain of a Boeing 747.

Figure 46: TomTom ONE Main Menu

Take a look at this! TomTom has finally added the Clear route to the main page on the Main Menu! Previously, if you wanted to add a Clear route button on your TomTom GO, you had to select "Show All Menus" from the "Change preferences" menu. And even then, the Clear route was buried 2 levels deep, meaning you had to essentially press 4 buttons if you wanted to cancel a route while you were driving. Now TomTom has put this essential feature where it belongs: up front and on the main menu. Thank you TomTom!

Figure 47: Itinerary Planning

Multi-destination routing is possible with the ONE. You can also have the ONE optimize the addresses in the itinerary so that you are driving in an efficient manner. This is useful, for example, if you want to visit 5 open houses to look at real estate. The ONE can suggest an order to look at the addresses so that you're not driving in circles or doubling back.

Figure 48: itinerary Planning

To build a multi-destination trip, you add addresses into an itinerary that you save. You can also add POI's or saved waypoints to an itinerary.

SiRF's High Performance GPS Receiver

Just one year ago if you bought a GPS device, you'd need unobstructed line-of-sight to get a good signal. All that changed when GPS makers began using SiRF's new high performance chipset. Like the TomTom GO 510 and 910, the ONE uses SiRF's Star III chipset. GPS performance is nothing short of amazing. The ONE always acquired a strong signal quickly, and held the signal even in dense urban environments, like New York City. I was even able to obtain a strong signal indoors! SiRF's new chipset is a watershed event for GPS navigation, and has made navigation devices much more reliable and useful. If you've been waiting for a the next evolution in GPS before purchasing a GPS, this is the year to do it. Make absolutely sure that the GPS you buy has a SiRF Star III chipset in it. Thankfully, the ONE uses the SiRF Star III and performance is outstanding.