» TomTom XL 335S 4.3-Inch Portable GPS Navigator >> car gps systems, car navigation systems - Shop Compare and Reviews Store, Buy Cheap Best Prices on sale, review, price

good purchase, great performance
I used Magellan before. But Tom Tom is a lot different. Quick rerouting time is wonderful. This is my second Tom Tom and I replaced the old one with a higher model. XL-335T is a good purchase and great performance.

Don't Understand the Bad Reviews
So I decided to purchase this unit despite a slew of negative reviews on Amazon. After using this TomTom for a week now I am sure glad I made the decision to buy it. After owning several other makes of GPS units including Garmin and Magellan, the TomTom is a breath of fresh air for me. I finally have a GPS unit that does not treat me like a kindergartner and gives me to power use, customize and configure it how I see fit. I do consider my self to be more technically savvy than some and I really feel that the TomToms play into that customer profile by offering more advanced features than any other brand on the market today. Furthermore, if you lean towards the technically challenged side of the street, the TomTom just works out of the box without any additional fiddling. I used my unit as such for the first few days until I had to start seeing what else it could do.

The user interface is different from Garmin and Magellan, but different in a very good way. It takes a little adjusting if you have previous experience with the other manufactures, but you will quickly understand why the folks at TomTom are way ahead of the curve.

For the price point this unit offer a ton a features that are normally only packaged in higher end GPS units including some TomTom specific features like IQ Routes and user community supported Map Corrections. Lifetime traffic and map updates are also very nice as I have found out the hard way with previous GPS units that Map updates are a deal breaker from a cost point of view. I purchased the XL 335TM which is supposed to include Maps for Only the US and Canada but to my surprise Mexico was also included.

I would recommend this unit to any one of my friends and family.

Mount is Too Rigid
The unit itself was perfectly fine, but I didn't like the quality of the voice, the directions seemed a bit off to me and most importantly I think TomTom uses a bad mount that's too small and rigid. I tested a couple of different versions of this and snapped the mount twice by just barely turning it. It's not a bad GPS, but it's not great either.

not a promising beginning
at the moment I'd consider this purchase a bust -- on the first time out I was getting instructions that took me down dead ends, told me I had reached my destination (which was familiar to me - I was just trying it out for the fun of it) when it had taken me half a mile in the opposite direction. I'm going to try an online map update and see if things right themselves otherwise, back she goes.

Not quite as Advertised.
Purchased this recently after seeing my father-in-law's TomTom 540TM.

According to TomTom's web pages and description, this device was supposed to be similar to the 540 besides the screen size, which was ok with me. However, I've found that it isn't quite what is advertised. The first problem is in the lane assist features. The Tom-Tom web page suggests that this device will show a nice graphic at interchanges illustrating what lanes to be in. I've seen this feature work as shown on their web page on the 540 my father-in-law has, but it does not work like that on the 335. Instead, the 335 has some basic arrows that show up under the main graphics in either blue or white to illustrate what lanes to be in and what lanes you shouldn't be in. While this is ok as a passenger, it is difficult to see while driving and trying to keep an eye on the road. Fortunately, the voice queues do a decent job of keeping you in the correct lanes.

The map downloads and traffic feature do seem to work well on this device. I am not a fan of how their map download works since they have you download the full map, when it would be much more effective to provide updates for only those things that have changed. Downloading ~2GB in one file is not as straight forward as it sounds and it took 4 times to get a successful download (files were corrupt the previous tries). The traffic feature is quite useful, although its estimates of delays aren't very accurate. That is probably to be expected since traffic is often dynamic and ever changing. It is nice that at least I know it is coming up.

I do like a lot of the features in the Tom Tom. The directions are quite accurate, and they do a good job of giving advanced notice of when to make turns. I find that when I deviate from the projected route that the Tom Tom does a fairly decent job of updating the route. However, there have been a couple of occasions where I have deviated from a route to have the Tom Tom suggest an alternative that was clearly bad in an effort to get me back to the original route. In each case, prolonged neglect of the directions resulted in the Tom Tom asking whether I wanted to change my route, which I found odd... Most of the time it just changes it.

I do find the points of interest and itinerary features nice. The points of interest allow me to find a close by gas station or restaurant and with experimentation one can navigate to such a place without deviating from the ultimate goal. The only problem I've had is that in searching for a POI, the distance can get a bit deceiving as it isn't always given for the location you are currently at but rather from where you are searching relative to. An example is that I was driving through the bay area north of San Francisco, CA (Santa Rosa area) and looking for a restaurant in the Santa Rosa area. When I search by name relative to where I was at, no results were returned, which is fine. Instead I chose to search relative to a city. The result showed the restaurant to be 10 miles, but it was actually 10 miles from that city, which ended up being 20 miles from where I was at (when I was 10 miles from that city to begin with). While it wasn't a big deal, I feel like the results should show the distance relative to where the GPS is at either instead of or in addition to relative to the location searched.

Last, the voice directions are not bad, but they aren't great either. Only the computer voices give directions that include street and city names, which can be essential when you are in an urban area and you are counting on audio since looking at the screen can be distracting. The problem is that living in California and using the default computer voice has it doing a less than perfect job at pronouncing items. While it picks up some details in pronouncing Spanish based words (San Jose is done decently), it does a horrible job for other Spanish based words (San Francisco, San Jose). Interestingly enough, if I download the UK based computer voice, the pronunciation improves quite a bit. That is probably something any Tom Tom user should consider if they are having that problem. The only problem with the UK based voice is that distances are given in Yards once you are down under a mile from a direction as opposed to fractions of a mile. It isn't a big deal, but when you are used to 1/2, 1/4, etc of a mile, it can be a bit confusing. I've adjusted as I'd rather hear my cities and streets pronounced correctly than the distances.

Overall, the device is decent, although I will say that the "deal of the day" value made it better than full price would have. I do find that many of the features are good and that as long as Tom Tom stays with the basic operations, I'll buy one in the future when I finally need an upgrade.