Reviews by mal138

mal138 says "Garmin beats TomTom hands down" about Garmin - iQue 3600 Car GPS Receiver

mal138 — Sun, 02 Mar 2008 04:44:58 GMT

I've had my Garmin iQue 3600 for probably about three years now, so when my wife decided to buy a TomTom One XL, we were very quick to discover the things we liked and disliked about each. Surprisingly the iQue beat the TomTom hands-down, despite the technology being several years older.

The biggest advantage of the iQue 3600 (and any Garmin product that uses CityNavigator software) over the TomTom XL is the vast collection of points of interest. CityNavigator comes with practically any business you could think of. (Even our home-based web development company shows up!) My wife's TomTom can't even locate a Starbucks in the DC metropolitan area!

Of course the iQue is not just a GPS but a Palm PDA too! This means wherever I travel, I always have instant access to my address book, calendar, notepad, and tons of other Palm utilities, plus of course an assortment of games that I've installed. This is probably a bigger selling point if you are already a Palm user. If not, you may...

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mal138 says "Stick to Garmin!" about TomTom - One XL GPS Navigation System

mal138 — Sat, 25 Aug 2007 02:52:45 GMT

The TomTom ONE XL is easy to use, easy to see, and easy to hear, but lacks a lot of features that make a GPS truly useful. If this is your first GPS unit and you use it primarily to go from one address to another, you'll probably be happy. But if you've ever used a Garmin unit, you'll quickly learn where the TomTom falls short.

Some of the nice features of the TomTom include an easy-to-use touch-screen interface, easy to see screen, and clear directions. It's lightweight and much thinner than many Garmin and Magellen units. The widescreen format looks neat but is pretty useless -- after all, when you're driving you want to see what's ahead of you, not what's on either side of you. The ONE XL also provides good routing, and you can have it prompt you whether you want to avoid toll roads or not each time you plan a route, which is nice. (You can also set it to always avoid or not avoid toll roads, but it's nice to be given the choice without having to go into the settings menu.)...

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