TomTom ONE 130 3.5-Inch Portable GPS Navigator

We used it right away for a trip and it was great. Easy to read and voacal directions easy to follow. Highly recommended.

Great compact device with integrated suction device that locks on your windshield. Would buy again.

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.

Mine broke (frozen after startup) 1.5 months after I bought it, right when I went on vacation. After going to www.tomtom.com/support and installing TomTom Home and following THEIR INSTRUCTIONS it still was frozen, so I called customer support and here is what they told me:

1) The instructions on their TomTom Home software is wrong - you must always turn the product off before unplugging it. They made is sound like it is my fault for following their faulty instructions "do you ever unplug your computer before turning it off". By the way - I do and it still continues to work.

2) Even after phone support the product still doesn't work, and the support person tells me that I must charge the product before use for 4 hours, and then continue to do so on a weekly basis, or this product could corrupt itself. And I should charge for exactly 4 hours - not overnight - because the battery could overheat and it would shut itself down.

This device is too fragile to be used as a portable device. It should be robust like a cell phone if it is to be used as a portable device, not become corrupt on a weekly basis.

Anyway, my device still doesn't work and they gave me the option of sending it in for repair (4 weeks) or returning it to the store I bought it at for a new one.

Several other reviewers have mentioned that the unit becomes inoperative when updated online. That happened to me too. I should have listened. Out of the box the unit worked so-so, seemed to make a 15 minute trip out of a 5-minute one. I decided to update online. It took a while to get that going, not user-friendly at all. First of all I made a backup of the software on my computer (that took 30 minutes). After installing the updates, the unit could not connect to the Internet. I tried another computer, did the update all over again. When I tried to use the unit I got a flashing X across the screen. Spent the next 6 hours trying to fix things as suggested by the Tomtom help files. Nothing worked. Tried to reinstall the backed-up software. Did not work either. Thank heavens Amazon lives up to its reputation and makes my return easy.