The TomTom ONE is designed for people who want a GPS solely for navigation purposes, and are not looking for an integrated music or video player, don't want a photo viewer, Bluetooth hands-free speakerphone, blah blah... The ONE is all about navigation. In exchange for these features, what you get is a high-performance, well designed GPS for under $400. When I first started using the ONE, I was amazed at its small size and ease of use. In fact, the TomTom ONE would be the GPS to beat, were it not for its fatal flaw of Tele Atlas mapping data.

Design 

The TomTom ONE is what I could characterize as a slim and pocketable GPS. It comes with a standard 3.5 inch display which can show 64,000 colors. The display itself is quite nice; the colors do not shift much until you look at it from extremely wide viewing angles and it is plenty bright so that it will not wash out too much in direct sunlight. While the display does not automatically switch from day to night node, you can manually set night mode in three clicks. The night and day modes also have their own brightness controls so you can set it very bright during the day and very dark at night. There are also ten different color schemes to select from if you don’t like the default colors.

I was skeptical of the mount at first. It is a really simple design with only one moving part, the ball and socket joint. This joint type allows you to tilt or rotate the display to any angle while suctioned to your windshield. Typically, I prefer these ball and socket type connections since they are easier and faster to adjust. However the TomTom ONE mount was just a little bit too tight and a couple of times I pulled the suction off the windshield trying to adjust the angle of the display. Others have criticized the mount for being too short. The face of the ONE will be about 3-3.5 inches from the windshield. This worked just fine for me, and in comparison the Nuvi mount puts the Nuvi about 3.75 inches from the windshield so there is only about a .5 inch difference between them.

Along the top of the ONE is the power button, and a charger indicator light. Good move to put the charge light on top where it will not interfere with the display at night. The speaker is on the back and there is an SD card slot on the bottom. (The maps come loaded on the SD card.) Unfortunately, the USB/power connector is on the bottom of the device. This is one of the few faults I have with the TomTom ONE. Putting the power connector at the bottom limits how low on the dash the screen can be. To accommodate for the power connector I need to mount the GPS an inch or two higher than I would otherwise. Having the GPS rest on the dash in addition to being mounted via the suction cup also makes the GPS more sturdy, but unfortunately you can’t take advantage of that trick.

At 3.8 inches in width, one inch thick, and weighing about 5.6 ounces the TomTom ONE is highly portable. There is also functionality to create pedestrian routes so if you need to navigate by foot, the ONE will fit nicely in your hand or shirt pocket. Just watch out for the battery life which is a little short at about 2 hours.

Turning On the One For The First Time

The first time you power on the TomTom ONE, you are presented with a brief series of questions to setup your unit. First, language selection. One thing TomTom's always been strong on is broad language support. After you tap the language of your choice, you are prompted to verify your language selection. Good thing too -- I accidentally tapped some indecipherable language and was thankful there was a "cancel" option.

Now that we've chosen our language (English U.S., in my case), the TomTom has a few more questions for us (this seems like an unnecessary step to me -- might as well just ask the next question instead). At first I thought this option was designed for all you wizards and witches who are left-handed. But that wouldn't make sense, since you'd still have to use your right hand to operate the unit, given the steering wheel placement in the car. And then I realized that this option is for those idiots customers who drive on the left side of the street. Seems like TomTom could just assume that in North America the ONE will be in a right-hand drive car, but nevertheless I suppose this could be a useful option for some.

Ahh the metric system. Anyone in North America using the Metric system is in for an unpleasant surprise when they hit the highway system. Again, I guess this is useful in some countries, but it seems like for the North America edition they could safely assume customers will want Miles.

Now this is something I've never understood about the TomTom products. In order for GPS to work, the unit must receive very accurate time signals from the satellites, and then calculate offsets. So, there's really no reason you should have to manually set the time, since it should always be receiving the most accurate time via GPS signal. There's a Sync button on the lower left hand corner you can press to have the unit get the time from the GPS signal, but why not just do that automatically (like the Garmin and Magellan do)?

Like the TomTom GO 910, the ONE comes with a large library of built-in voices, and can be expanded by downloading additional voices via TomTom's website. There are computer generated voices, and real human voices to choose from. If you select a computer generated voice, the ONE will read aloud street names via text-to-speech. If you choose a human recorded voice, only a handful of voice prompts are announced (i.e. "keep right at the fork" instead of "keep right onto Main Street"). Next you are prompted to choose which map on the SD card you want to use. In my case, USA and Canada.

The final step in the setup wizard is setting your home address. Once all the setup steps have been completed, you're ready to navigate and the TomTom shows your current position on the map. Tapping anywhere on the map brings up the Main Menu. From here, you can enter an address to navigate to, adjust system options, and manage saved addresses (favorites). 

Mounting the TomTom ONE in the Car

The mount itself is an interesting design. To attach the mount to the windshield you simply apply pressure to the center of the mount. To remove it from the windshield, you pull the tab on the bottom of the suction disc. The mount holds the TomTom ONE securely in place and I noticed no vibration while driving.

I found it slightly difficult to slide the ONE onto the mount. First, it's hard to see exactly where the unit connects to the mount. It would be easier to slide the unit onto the mount if the guides on the back of the ONE were wider, making it so you could start sliding the unit down onto the mount from almost anywhere on the back. Instead, you have to line things up exactly, which is difficult to do when you cannot see the back of the unit. Second, you have to apply a considerable amount of force to make the unit "snap" into place. For this reason, I recommend connecting the ONE to the mount BEFORE mounting it on the window.

Using the TomTom ONE

TomTom has spent some time engineering a fantastic user interface and it shows. Like the rest of the ONE, the styling is fresh and well designed. I found the system intuitive to use and simple enough that reading a manual was unnecessary. 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.

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. 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.

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). 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. 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. 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. 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.

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.

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.

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.

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. 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.

Avoiding Roadblocks, Streets, Towns

This is another area where the TomTom ONE (and all TomTom devices) really excel. There are many types of “avoidances” you can set. If you are taking a “Sunday drive” you can “calculate alternative” which will take you to your destination in an entirely different way than originally calculated. Often when going on a short family trip I will navigate to a POI, then on the return calculate a route home and then “calculate alternative” to take me home an entirely different way than I came. You can also “Avoid Roadblock”. Very sensible lengths of blocks are displayed for you to choose from; 100 yards, 1/4 mile, 1 mile, and 3 miles. You can also “travel via” to add a via point to your route. You can select from your favorites, an address, a recent destination, a POI, a point on the map, a set of coordinates or several other types of locations. You can also avoid a specific part of the route. This feature has come in handy for me several times. You can select a specific street to avoid, and the GPS will calculate another way around. Something that I use even more often however is to avoid a specific town. If for example you are driving from Hartford, CT to Washington, DC you will likely get a route directly through NYC!. probably not what you want to do. You could use this to select a certain city to avoid and the TomTom ONE will route you around that city.

Conclusion

Clearly TomTom has put a lot of R&D into the ONE. In developing the ONE, TomTom focused on the customer who is concerned chiefly with navigation, and does not want an MP3 player, a picture viewer, or a hands-free speakerphone. That pretty much describes me to a tee, so I thought the ONE and me were going to get along great. Unfortunately, TomTom has chosen Tele Atlas as its mapping data provider. Here in the United States, NAVTEQ (the larger competitor to Tele Atlas) has more accurate and complete maps. It's no coincidence that Garmin, Magellan, Yahoo, Google, and MSN all use NAVTEQ.

The ONE is a beautiful device that's small enough to keep with you at all times. The interface is nice looking and easy to use. The voice prompts sound like a human being and not a computer. The included windshield mount works well and keeps the ONE solidly in place and vibration free while driving. With so much going for it, I couldn't help being frustrated with the Tele Atlas maps. In my rigorous testing, the ONE simply didn't have the addresses of many locations that other NAVTEQ-powered GPS units did.