TomTom ONE V3 Europe

Author's product rating:   

Reliability	Good
Ease of Use	Average
Look & Feel	Good
Battery life	Good
Value for Money	Excellent

Advantages:	Price, Free traffic updates, slimline, Tom Tom one home
Disadvantages:	Accuracy of TMC (not tom toms fault), Map problems,

Recommend to potential buyers:

yes

Full review

I Recently replace my Garmin Street pilot unit with a TOM TOM V3 Europe (Traffic edition). I mainly did this because I wanted a low cost traffic solution, and I was able to get this from Halfords for under £170.00 (at the time of purchase) It came complete with the TMC receiver module.

Another reason for choosing Tom Tom was how disappointed I was with my Garmin, and how much better my Wife's Tom Tom one original was compared to it.

The unit is small and light, and the TMC receiver stays in my car fixed on with suction pads. It has a touch screen, and the menu icons are quite large. However I have thick fingers and I find that the touch pad keyboard screen used for Post codes/addresses is too small and I often get letters/numbers that I havent touched.

The display screen is smaller than compared to many other units, but I have never found this to be any kind of a problem at all. It is large enough to clearly display upcomming turns/direction, and in any case the voice navigation tells you what to do (but not always clearly correct eg when joining the M60 from the M61)

The menu system is different on the V3 from the original, and one Item that was great on the original, but has departed from the V3 is the ability to make and populate your own POI categories.

Another difference is that the old units made use of an SD card and it was possible to have a selection of maps for different countries on SD card, which you just re-inserted. This is no longer possible. If you want more than Europe you can no longer buy the map on SD card, but must now buy and down load it to your PC, and then replace the maps on the unit via Tom Tom Home. This means that PC connectivity is now much more important than it used to be.

Tom Tom one Home (where you connect to your PC and updates it) is nice. Using this method you can apply downloaded or custom POI, BUT this is not as easy as it was on the Garmin, which you could generate yourself easily in MS excel, or any other application capable of creating CSV files. It should be noted that you can add new POI to the existing Built in Categories as corrections, but you cant update bespoke POI categories in this way.

Another missing feature that can be a pain is the inability to plan an itenary. Basically you plan from start to next destination and that is it, although you can go via somewhere whilst on route if say you need a meal say.

There are also noticable mapping errors (which applying the latest updates hasnt corrected), and although you can record and update map faults, new and changed layout roads aren't used for navigation.

There are also errors that I dont seem to be able to do anything about (eg I regularly drive up the M61 from the M62 and back to Horwich and at one point, the unit would have me exit the M61 and rejoin at the same Motorway junction. )

The traffic works Ok once you get a signal (very shaky in some areas), rerouting you if it deems necessary, BUT and this is a big BUT, it is obviously only as useful as the TMC information received (in the UK TMC is nothing to do with Tom Tom but is supplied via the Classic FM radio station signal), and regular slow traffic conditions (as well as minor roads) arent often reported The M60 is always jammed solid at Rush hours but the TMC shows these as small delays - (obviously untrue as a 30 minute journey in normal times takes an hour at rush hour).

All this sounds very negative, but in practical use the unit is good. It maintains a fantastic signal connection to the GPRS (particularly when compared to my old Garmin which could take several minutes to even locate a GPRS on start up), and has loads of useful features (My unit included speed camera locations as a default). The PC connectivity is good and the ability to share corrections is nice.