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The TomTom One XL is an TomTom One with a widescreen and $100 bigger price tag. Software, hardware, user interface, windscreen mount, speaker etc etc all the same, just a bigger screen. So, why? And why wouldn’t you buy one of those sleek, black, high-resolutuon, Bluetooth, iPod-interfaced Navmans (Navmen?) for the same price or less?

Physical design Rating:

This is a nice bit of kit! It’s thin (something like 20mm at its thickest point), tastefully coloured in matt black and silver, with a substantial metal-grilled speaker at the back and a rubberised power button on the top. The speaker doubles as an attachment for the windscreen mount, which is compact and operates on a ball-joint so you can really adjust the positioning to allow for glare, use by passengers etc. The matt anti-glare wide screen seems so mich bigger than the TomTom One’s, making the unit easier to use (buttons are further apart and bigger, the view of the road is much better, the on-screen QWERTY keyboard actually usable…) and also making it feel svelte and lithe rather than squat and fat. Nice one.

The only niggles are that the powoer switch is quite hard to depress with big fingers and requires a few seconds of pressure to turn on – a bit awkward – and the mini-USB/ charger port on the bottom is seriously recessed, making it basically impossible to plug it in while it’s mounted to the screen. I still haven’t worked out how to consistently reattach the unit to the windscreen mount, so I ruin the cool look of the device by fumbling around with it, twisting this way and that until it clicks in place. I’m sure there’s a simple way… but I haven’t found it yet.

Versus the competition it stacks up well, though as I mentioned in the intro, the Navmans have really updated their physical and sofware design recently, so in the shop the TomTom struggles a bit to convince.

User Interface Rating:

Same old TomTom interface. Shows what years of tweaking and refining one UI has done – it’s basic, forgiving and most-importantly, consistent. Generally, menu items are logically arranged, and the buttons at the bottom of the screen (“Done”, “Cancel” etc) are ever-present and as I said, forgiving if you forget what you’re doing halfway through changing the route. The presentation of newer features like the driving break suggestions (which pop up a picnic table icon after a few hours of driving) and map corrections is great, though I can’t see how they’d work on a non-widescreen unit.

I’ve always found the “browse the map” mode a bit clunky on TomTom… the map refresh seems a lot snappier on the XL than I had on my Pocket PC (odd as the processor and memory are significantly inferior on the XL) which was one frustration, but I think the main problem is it’s just not as easy to use and read as Google Maps, which has set the standard for

Shame the interface looks so dated versus the other units in the shops, as I’m sure Navman is getting a lot more custom than it should at the moment simply because their latest UI looks like it was designed this century. When you’re fiddling with units in the shops you have very little to go on and sadly the gorgeous physical design of the device doesn’t fully marry with iits software.

Routing Rating:

Some frustrations here, but these are mainly related to the poor quality of mapping and POIs in particular. We had a few occasions where TomTom would refuse to route via a particular waypoint presumably because it involved going back on ourselves. Not the end of the world, but had we not known the road map quite well, we might have thought it was telling us the route was impossible (“No route possible”). Generally its work was cut out for it in WA/ NT as there’s usually only one sealed road between points A and B, so the main irritation was when we were looking for a petrol station or rest area en-route to our destination, and would get the all-too-familiar “No POI found”.

Points of Interest quality Rating:

What do you need most in a part of the world where roads are straight for 50km at a time, “towns” (if you can call places with 50 inhabitants that) are 350km apart, and 150m-long roadtrains roar unstoppably past every 30 minutes? You need to know where you can get petrol, and where you can safely and legally stop during the day and night. What does TomTom provide? Sporadic, inaccurate and incomplete coverage, missing both the POI and the access roads leading to them. 20 minutes spent with some local tourist literature gives you a completely accurate view of the Parking and Rest Areas in WA, so it’s inexcusable for TomTom not to include up-to-date POI – not to mention dangerous. Poor.

Mapping quality Rating:

We were pretty disappoi9nted by the mapping in WA and NT. Considering there are hardly any roads out there (the Great Northern Road from Broome to Darwin, for example, is a xxxx km straight drive) you’d think companies as well-established as TomTom/ Navteq could get their act together and keep them up to date. Despite their “latest maps guarantee” which is meant to update the built-in map from the Internet for a month after purchase, we hit far too many junctions which weren’t mapped, roads which had moved years ago and not been updated, missing rivers and bridges, and as I mentioned in the POI section, an unforgiveable lack of rest areas, parkiing areas and roadhouses. In towns the quality was generally fine, but you don’t buy a TomTom to mavigate around towns with populations of 500. Poor.

Summary

I’m sure when we get back to Sydney and do more driving on the East coast I’ll feel more comfortable with this purchase. The real summary for WA and NT is: software and hardware = really great, even if the UI design feels a bit dated, POI and mapping = poor, maybe dangerously so. Feels like half the country’s just been forgotten in their updates.

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