| TomTom One 130S |
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Everyone seems to want a GPS in their car and for good reason too. They provide easy, one-touch access to vital traffic information to help you get to your destination on time. The TomTom One 130S is a great new GPS with text-to-speech functionality, advanced route calculations, access to online community databases, and PC connectivity all in one small device with a cheap price. The TomTom One 130S is quite small, measuring 3.2 x 3.8 x 1-inches and weighing just short of 3 pounds. The new EasyPort mount comes attached to the back of the device right out of the box, unlike most other GPS's. The EasyPort is basically just a ball-and-socket adjustable arm with a suction cup on the end to suction onto a car's windshield. It works pretty nicely and mounts easily. The whole EasyPort mount is also detachable for use outside of the car as well. The screen is a 3.5-inch 320x240 touch screen LCD and it looks very nice in typical conditions. The touch screen is very easy to use and the interface on the TomTom One 130S is easy to use and well-laid out. The home screen has nine different features laid out on two different screens. You can tap "Navigate To" and it will displays options for favorites, addresses, recent destinations, map points, and points of interest (POIs). To enter an address for your destination, just tap "Address" and it will allow you to enter in as much information as you know, such as street, house number, zip code, or intersection. When you begin typing, a list of possible entries will appear to help speed along typing tasks. When you've told it where you want to go, it will use your current position determined by the GPS satellites and calculate your route for you. It will also give you options to modify your route, such as avoiding freeways, the fastest/shortest routes, and also routes for bicycling and walking. While the TomTom One 130S is in route navigation mode, it will show a map display in either 3D or 2D map modes. There is a little area of the screen which shows your current direction and distance traveled as well as the distance to the next turn.You can also customize another area of the screen to show various other information such as speed, time remaining, and distance to destination. The text-to-speech directions were very clear sounding and worked effectively. Another nice feature of the TomTom One 130S is the map correction feature, which provides you a way to correct the internal maps if something is different from the map. For example, you can remove streets, edit street names, update speed limits, add/edit/remove POIs, and change one-way traffic directions. The device can also received updates from the online TomTom community when you connect it to your computer, if you choose to. It comes with free MapShare updates for all of the pre-loaded United States and Canada maps and POI databases. When you connect it to a PC via USB interface, you can access many neat features. One of which is the QuickFix GPS data, which are the predicted orbits of the GPS satellites for the upcoming week to help the TomTom One 130S lock onto the satellites faster. You can also update all of the internal maps when you connect it to your computer as we mentioned earlier and apply community corrections as well. There are also free celebrity voices for directional prompts, but not street names. You can also purchase additional maps and subscribe to fuel-price data online as well. Unlike some GPS units, the TomTom One 130S does not come with a traffic subscription service. However, for $99 you can purchase an external traffic info antenna to subscribe to live traffic updates via Inrix's RDS-TMC service. This service also requires a data plan at the cost of $60 per year. It's a good thing to have if you commute a lot, especially on freeways, as it will provide real-time traffic information.
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