I wanted to like the 910, and what wasn't there to like? It has everything you would want in a GPS, but it just wasn't ready for a US release. I went through two units and upon returning my second, my local Best Buy salesperson said he had about eight units ready to be returned. The Garmin C550 was my next stop and I honestly couldn't be happier. Acquires a signal instantly and traffic is integrated into the power adapter. Mount is perfect and bluetooth supports voice dialing.

Nice to see the editor take a stand--makes GPS Mag well worth reading. Clearly, customer service and reliability matter in any emerging (and expensive) consumer electronics category.

Thansk Elliot -- that's the goal of GPS Magazine! And you're right: customer service and reliability are key in this market (and really anything you're going to use in a car while driving...)

Hi guys,

GPS magazine was one of my sources of information before i got my 910 about a month ago. I do realize that it has its flaws but so far i am enjoying my TTG. No experience with the Garmin though. I wish the Nuvi 360 had a bigger screeen. That would have certainly made me think twice. My only big big problem with the 910 is that it doesn't do off-map navigation so well. If you have a gps position say A (not on a street) and you want to travel to another gps position say B (also not on a street) Tomtom tries to get you back on the street. So Tomtom would not be appropriate for hiking or walking or even taking you back to your parking car (as it claims it does).

Maybe in my upgrade version i'll consider Garmin because i hear it's pretty good when it comes to navigation off actually streets. Anybody had any experience with this?

Thanks for all the info you provide. Good work.

Pedro

Wonderful comparison between the two. For weeks I read up on everthing I could between the two units. I end up buying both of them to compare. Well it has been about three weeks now. I since return the Go910. My conclusions are the same as yours. The c550 works flawlessly. I only wish the C550 display POI on the map.

Thanks for the comparison,

Khanh

Really excellent comparison.

I bought TomTom Go 700's. My wife's works fine. Mine constantly needs to be reset. Worse, every suggestion TomTom gives me is a joke. They don't speak English worth a D*** and their advice is worthless.

I'm so frustrated I decided tonight to buy something else. Your article helped me make up my mind.

Thanks for taking a decisive stand instead of wobbling around and making a "non choice". :-)

Kenrick

Oops, I meant to say, I bought two Go 700's.

Kenrick

Kenrick - You're welcome. That's the whole goal of GPSmagazine.com! I will not be influenced by advertisers or anything else. My goal is the let people really know what it's like to own these products, and which ones are really the best.
--Fletch

I have a couple of quick questions:
1. The ball-mount droop problem on the X10 TomToms - is this even with the mount twisted to the second click?
2. And the ball-mount on the C550 - it looks like a pure friction mount - how is this in the sun, on rough roads, and in corners? It just doesn't look like it could support the C550 unassisted.
3. Is the C550 a hard drive or flash memory? If you want to take it to Europe, how do you use European maps? On the SD card or by overwriting the inbuilt maps?

I'm stuck in a heart vs head decision. My heart wants a TomTom with the wider screen, more options and better interface. My head says the Garmin seems to have less problems. I'd like to believe Garmin might move the Nuvi interface on to the Streetpilots, but having owned Garmins before, typically they don't make radical changes to their firmware :(
Help :-)

Hi Chris
1. Yes - the mount fails even when clicked into the second position
2. The c550 is very light (less than half the weight of the TT 910). It's also very solid, and has no problems holding the c550 in place even over bumpy roads and in high heat.
3. the c550 is flash ram based and has maps of North America included. If you want to go to Europe with it, you'd need to purchase additional maps and use an SD card to load them onto the c550.

As for the heart vs. head decision -- having purchased both, I can tell you you'll end up with the Garmin once the "charm" wears off the TT 910. You may also want to take a look at Garmin's newly announce Zumo 550.
--Fletch

Fletch
Thanks for the reply. I took another look at both units last night. The Garmin just seems a little limited. You can't do fastest / shortest "on the fly" - it has to be a system-level selection. Plus it doesn't seem to have the re-route / avoid capability of the TomTom (for example, one of the main streets here is totally dug up right now - the garmin kept routing us along it with no way of telling it stop using that road). My wife doesn't like driving on freeways and I couldn't find a way of preventing the Garmin from using freeways either. The TomTom just has that x-factor in comparison to the somewhat 80's feel of the Garmin. This is a much more difficult choice than I thought it would be. Of course if Microsoft buy out Tomtom, the decision is made for me - I'd go with the Garmin without a second thought.

Fletch: Question about maps. I have European Streetpilot C550. Can I load US maps to flash memory too or do those need to be at memorycard. There is free space at flash, I could ofcourse fill it with MP3s and POIs but..

Why does the Garmin keeps telling me to keep right on the same road at all the time?

I too have tried both these units. I live in central-east England. The Garmin C510 went back in short order. It kept mixing up or missing turnings which were close together. It would update with the correct information 10-15 seconds too late. This was downright dangerous when using complex spaghetti motorway interchanges.

I tried to use the Garmin unit close to Heathrow airport. It went totally screwy and tried to tell me the hard shoulder on a motorway, on a flyover was my destination. It was about thirty miles off the true destination.

I suspect, as explained in the leader, this has more to do with the choice of mapping technology than anything else.

The 910 I have now does none of the above BUT that so and so screen mount. Mine has just broken. Now that I have seen inside the vacuum cup I would have just laughed had it not cost so much money. Its built like a childs £1 toy with out any engineering strength. The pull on the suction cups is fed through a little perspex fixing. The bit that boke is about 1/16" thick. This is all that is between all that weight and disaster.

Now that the 910 is taped to my dash ..... I do enjoy using it. The larger screen is really great for those older eyes.

Thanks for the informative review. I almost bought the TomTom 910 for a second car I just bought. I have a factory installed GPS in my Toyota sienna I just love.

On paper the TomTom 910 looked better than the Garmin units. I have been around technology for a long time and I have learned well that more features does not mean a better product. Customer service is important to me. I bought a Garmin Nuvi 360 instead. I should have it tomorrow. Looked better to me and I like the small size.

Your excellent review helped in my discision. Thanks.

I live in EU and so TeleAtlas is the better choice for me. I don't like the menue styling of the Garmin and the screen size is just too small. The look of that device really puts me off. After endless comparisons I'll go for the new TT One that leaves you with the choice for NavTeq and/or TeleAtlas and a nice 3,5 screen. It is the most portable and cheapest unit on the market. It has the best anti-theft device, being unbulky in your shirt pocket. The only backdraw is no chance to get audio on your car stereo and no handsfree calls. Well, if anyone used a professional handsfree device before, no GPS unit can substitute the quality. If you do family calls it's fine, for business it's just embarresing. The new TT One is my choice until the bigger units can really convince me that all the features work as advertised and of course the price adapted to the demand. To sum it up, the money I save in buying the TT One instead will allow me to navigate my family to an extended weekend stay at Disneyland.priceless.

I had the c330 Garmin and then bought a TT910. Actually the 910 navigation IS more intelligent although the TeleAtlas in the 910 has virtually no maps in Eire/Ireland whereas the old c330 has some. I agree that the TT service support is a joke. Run from a backstreet garage by idiots seems likely. Cheers PW

My tomtom stinks , so far it has given me erronious directions, one time into an area of street gang activity. Comp u plus, the seller, refuses to take it back for the selling price, and tom tom is "looking into it" but " is not in the habbit of taking items back for refund" , i dont trust it and have a $700 paper weight

Well, you can see that all fooks are from NA. Within Europe the TTGo is the best you can get. Travel now for years with TT so does my friens, never had any problems, and the traffic information in Europe through mobile is much better then using RDC. The Windsheeld mount sucks, you are right in that point. The looks of the garmin I don't agree at all. Terrible colours, oldfashion 3d. this is not a matter of taste, TT is really much better here.
with the quality of the screen I can imagine that Carmin is here the better one. In bright sunlight the TT has to much reflections.

Support I didn't need, that point I cant really judge. Only one time for a year ago I had a problem with my Handhelt with TT Navi 5, and I had good support per email. On european site I read people wich have software bugs with their Garmin, so I guess also Garmin is not perfect. I just had one bug for two years with TT Nav 5 on a handheld computer and a GPS antenna which was not functioning. For the rest no bugs at all. Could it be that this site is not so objective but more for TT haters ? Yeah the new kid but also with some cool new features you don't read about. Weather forcast for example over youre mobile, very much possiblities of planning alternatives routes.
Menus could have been better, I agree. I don't like that is seems impossible to put the routing off (when I just want to see the map, or just wanted to use the handsfree phone or MP3.
I good tip voor TT GO 910 users. You can buy from belkin a feature so you can hear the MP3, navigation and handsfree kit over your car stereo. Much better ofcourse. It sends the Audio Out over a radio signal, which your auto radio picks up like a radio channel.
PS the cards for europe work great almost a 100% hit ration. I red that Tomtom will give in the future a free choise of which maps you prefere: teleatlas or Navteq: everybody happy.

Regards.
Ronald

Hello, I found this review to be quite informative, especially with the bad rap that the TeleAtlas maps regarding its accuracy. I do not have any of the products reviewed here, but is it possible that this inaccuracy can be due to the different datums out there? For example, using the WGS84 datum in a device used in the continental U.S. is just fine but it may cause problems say if used in Puerto Rico (PR). This happened to a friend I had in PR. He always complained that his location was off by so much. He was the advised to change his datum (forgot what device and software he was using at the time) to that of Puerto Rico and his problem was solved. Maybe if companies such as TomTom (and others) should incorporate a feature where it is possible to change the datum used on the device or to create your own to resolve the issue with map/position inaccuracies.