Mio c310x

Mio made what I consider a typical mistake of placing the power connector (in this case the mini USB plug) at the bottom of the device. This makes it harder to have the GPS sit low on the dash. With the device higher it is more prone to vibration and may obstruct your forward view a tiny bit more than if it could rest on the dash completely like the Nuvi can.

The process of routing to an address works very well. You click ‘Menu’ –> ‘Address’ then select from either your current city, a list of recent cities you navigated to, or another city. As you enter in the city name, a number to the right side of the display indicates how many cities match what you have typed in so far. This gives you great instant feedback and will let you know when you have typed enough so that you can select the city from a list based on what you have typed in so far. A similar search function is provided for the street name.

There are a couple of other issues I have with the interface. The preferences are located in various locations all over the device and can be difficult to find. For example I couldn’t remember how to force day/night modes. At first i went to the settings button on the side, then hit the ‘Tools’ button and looked in ‘General’ with the gear icon. Not there. Then I went back to the settings button on the side, hit ‘Tools’ again, and this time clicked on ‘Advanced’ with the tools icon. Not in there either. Finally I went back to the ‘Cockpit’, clicked on ‘Menu’, then clicked on the tiny gear icon, and clicked the icon with the sun/moon on it. It would be much easier if all of the preferences for the Map mode were in one place.

Like other devices at this price point, there is no Bluetooth hands-free calling, no traffic receiver, no text-to-speech, and no option to add a traffic receiver later. However at this price those features are not expected. There is an MP3 player, however. It works like most other GPS MP3 players and if you are not going to use it with headphones like an iPod then the quality of the speaker isn’t good enough to replace your car stereo anytime soon. The Mio c310x also comes with the SiRFstarIII chipset which makes signal acquisition fast and reliable.

TomTom ONE XL HD Traffic

World’s first portable navigation device with High Definition Traffic offers:
Up to five times more traffic updates
At least ten times more road coverage
More accurate travel and arrival times with measurements of the delays in minutes
The TomTom ONE XL HD will ensure a safe and fun trip taking the stress out of everyday driving and trip planning.

At its heart lies TomTom’s award-winning plug-and-go navigation software, but the new 4.3” wide high-quality touchscreen makes navigating even easier.

Your TomTom ONE XL HD has a pre-installed maps of UK and Ireland and database of safety camera locations in the UK. This database is fully integrated in your TomTom ONE XL navigation software and alerts to warn you when there is a fixed safety camera on your route.

Combined with the new HD Traffic service, TomTom also launches the first PND which is compatible with this real-time traffic information.

The TomTom One XL HD comes with hundreds of points of interest providing useful information for your journey. Simply type in your location and zap! off you go - or choose a different route.

In other words, the Tom Tom ONE XL HD makes getting there better than ever.
This new TomTom ONE XL HD will accept a Vodafone network SIM card, which can be used to connect to the Vodafone network. This way, the position of the PND is continuously followed, and in that way it can add more information to improve the traffic mapping. That same connection is used every three minutes to acquire the actual traffic data, and that data is used whilst navigating and the planning the route.

The rest of the ONE XL HD Traffic’s specifications are identical to those of the existing ONE XL, e.g. the 4.3 inch touch screen and the latest map of 25 countries in Western-Europe. The TomTom ONE XL HD Traffic is shipped initially with NavCore version 7.30, a version specially created with support for the retrieval and processing of traffic information.

HD Traffic Subscription

This amount includes the use of HD Traffic and the charges for the data traffic for one year. The subscription can be renewed every year for € 9.95/month. This also includes the costs of the live data connection.

Technical Specifications
Highly sensitive GPS receiver
4.3 inch full TFT colour LCD touch screen (480 x 272 pixels, 64.000 colours)
Internal memory 1 GB
GPRS Modem with built-in SIM card for live data connection
SD slot (only for additional maps, SD not included)
Internal Lithium-Ion battery (2 hours operation)
119 x 86 x 27 mm
230 grams
Operating temperature: -10 °C to +55 °C
Map Coverage: Republic of Ireland, United Kingdom

Unique TomTom Map Share™ Technology

That’s it – your map is updated! Connect to TomTom HOME to receive and share map updates with the entire Map Share community.


The TomTom ONE XL HD also sees the introduction of TomTom’s unique new map improvement technology, TomTom Map Share™. This technology enables drivers to easily and instantly improve their own maps. It also lets users share improvements and benefit from all other users’ improvements, daily, automatically and easily via Tom Tom HOME – TomTom’s free software application. TomTom has the world’s largest satellite navigation community with over 10 million users. TomTom Map Share™ users can contribute and exchange all their improvements amongst each other, making the best maps available for all of them. Tom Tom Map Share™ means TomTom drivers can always have the most up-to-date maps and inside local knowledge at their fingertips (see separate press release for more information on TomTom Map Share™). The all new Navcore 7 software is feature enriched and also gives you more accurate maps and POI's. customising is definitely something which Tomtom will be improving on in TomTom ONE XL HD.

Garmin Nuvi 760

Physical Design

The Nuvi 760 is a beautiful GPS device. Maybe not quite as sexy as the TomTom 720, but we’ll still take her out. A few immediate differences are seen from the previous top of the line 600 series. First, the face of the device is black. To me, this is an improvement over the previous Nuvi devices not simply from an aesthetic point of view, but it also makes the screen appear slightly easier to read against the high contrast surroundings. We’ve talked about the color of your GPS before and this is a tiny but welcome change.

Another improvement over the 600 series is that the flip-up antenna is gone. No more pulling up the antenna to activate the GPS chip. It does seem to take noticeably longer for the 760 to get a GPS signal each time we turn it on compared to our 300, and 600 series Nuvi devices. Across the top of the device is a slider which turns the 760 on and off, and can serve as a “hold” switch causing the device to ignore touch screen input. That feature can be especially handy for pedestrian use. On the left side is a headphone jack and SD card slot. The maps are loaded in an internal memory so the SD card slot is only needed for additional map coverage or multimedia files, should you desire. Along the bottom is a USB port for connections to your computer, as well as the power/mount connector. On the back is also a connector for an external GPS antenna, should you need one, but you probably won’t.
In typical Garmin fashion, the mount and hardware design is nearly perfect. The mount is compact making it easy to stow, the ball and socket joint in the mount is perfectly tensioned for easy adjustability of screen angle, yet it holds tight enough to not bounce around on rough roads.

The power adapter for the car also serves double duty as the FM TMC traffic antenna. This is simply brilliant. The last thing I need is one more cord hanging around my dash… especially one with multiple suction cup mounts that just scream “Expensive GPS hidden in this car!”. Integrating the traffic antenna with the power cord eliminates a dash full of spaghetti cable and one less accessory to forget taking with me. Before using one of these combo cords I was concerned that it might not have as good of reception as a separate cord stuck up on the windshield, but I’ve found with this and other Garmin combo power/antennas that the reception has been just fine.

Of course the only way to make the traffic receiver even better would be to incorporate it into the device itself so I could still get traffic on trips less than 4 hours (estimated battery life) without needing to take the traffic adapter. But still the traffic solution offered with the 760 does beat the competition when it comes to convenience and other devices that have built in traffic receivers haven’t had great reception.

Perhaps the best part of the newer Nuvi devices is the screen. The screen is incredibly bright, brighter than just about any other GPS on the market. These newer screens (as compared to the early 300 series for example) are so bright it is the only GPS I’ve ever considered turning down the brightness from the maximum setting. Text is crisp, and extremely readable.

We would have liked if the Garmin 760 came with an AC adapter, but in all fairness most other GPS companies are skimping on this accessory as well. While most of my trips are short enough to do without a power cable, you may still want to take the power cable with you since it doubles as the traffic receiver.
Routing to an Address

As you can imagine, I frequently get friends, neighbors, and relatives asking to borrow GPS devices. When someone who has never used a GPS device asks for a loaner, I often (but not always) hand them a Garmin. The reason is that they are dead simple to operate.

Navigating to an address is really simple. Power on -> Where to -> Address -> State -> City -> Street Number -> Street Name -> Go. But to be picky, there are a few things I’d like to see changed. I prefer to enter the street name first, then number. And why, oh why, does nearly any GPS on the market today not know that I type “NY” in the state field I want…… you guess…. New York! Again, in fairness most other GPS devices on the market are equally dumb and don’t understand state abbreviations. Instead I’ll just keep having to type N-E-W-Y-space-Y before it knows what I’m taking about.

Again, being really picky, there are two other things I don’t like about the Address entry feature. First, after selecting the city and town there is only one street in my town that begins with the letters “Mon”, yet I need to enter two more characters “Montg” before it will show me that one result. The second is that it isn’t at all accommodating if you make a spelling error. A few other devices on the market are much more elegant when it comes to spelling mistakes.

More people have recently begun to ask which GPS devices support QWERTY keyboards for address entry. The Garmin Nuvi 760 does offer a QWERTY option for you fast thumb keyboarders like myself.

Finding POIs

Finding POIs is just as simple. Where to -> Points of Interest -> select a category, a sub category if applicable, and then look through the resulting list. A nice bonus is that the list will tell you which direction the POI is in relative to your current location. The font size used is good and big, however we would prefer (again, being picky) that the address not be shown on this list instead making room for one more item on the list before you need to scroll. Once you click on a POI the address is shown, making it somewhat redundant in the POI list. Once you find the POI you are looking for, click ‘Go’ and you are on your way.

And we still would like to be able to view POI icons in the 3D map/navigation display, something that other devices have offered for quite a long time.
Multi Destination Routing

It took a few years, but Garmin finally heard the cry and has given us Multi Destination routing without the need for a big old bulky StreetPilot device. Thank you, thank you, thank you! To create a route with tons of points in it go to Tools -> Routes -> New. From here you can add a starting point, an end point, and lots of points in between. I haven’t yet tried to hit the limit on how many points you can add to a single route, but I’ve been told it is 50. If you need more than 50 points you should probably look into some sort of commercial navigation system anyway.

After you’ve entered in your starting point, your ending points, and intermediate points you can calculate the route and go. You can manually reorder the points in the route, or have them “optimized” by using the ‘Optimally Reorder Points’ function. Yes, the Garmin Nuvi 700 series does include the highly sought after “route optimization” feature many people are looking for. I’ve always been upset with a few GPS manufacturers who offer a feature called “Route Optimization” but it is really “route sorting” where the list is sorted from closest to furthest away, which is often not the most efficient order. However once again, Garmin gets this right and the feature they call ‘Optimally Reorder Points’ is in fact true route optimization.

Note that through the Routes feature, you can now also plan routes in advance by setting a starting location other than your current location. In most other Nuvi devices you could only do that through a complex work around which involves disabling the GPS and then browsing the map to find your starting location. Not anymore! So when would you use this feature? Next week I’m going to a trade-show. I want to know now how far it is from the airport to my hotel. And I might want to plot out a route from the hotel to the convention center. With most of the other Nuvi devices it was an unbearable workaround to get that information. Now I can just take advantage of the Routes feature to set my starting location as a POI (the airport) and then my destination as another POI (the hotel) and preview the route.
Traffic

As mentioned above, integrated into the power connector is a FM Traffic antenna. Here you can connect to The Clear Channel Total Traffic Network (TTN) to receive live traffic information as it pertains to your route. While we’ve put quite a few miles on our 760, we haven’t yet spent a ton of time in traffic. While we’ve been in an area covered by the traffic service, we haven’t been able to spend time in rush hour traffic to give it a run. However there are not too many unknowns here. The TTN is used on quite a few devices, so we know the service works fairly well. And we can say that we were able to get a connection to the traffic network where a few other devices had dropped in “fringe” areas, so the reception appears to be fantastic.

You don’t need to turn anything on to activate the subscription. Once the GPS is plugged in and it finds a traffic report, the ticker starts on your three month trial subscription. After that the subscription costs $60 annually.