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 - Great productThe one xl-s is a great navigation tool. It is loud, bright, and gets you where you need to go. The satellite connection time is amazingly fast. The only problem is that sometimes the route it tells you to take is not always the smartest in terms of traffic and traffic lights. However, you'll get where you need to go regardless of which route you take. Sometimes the route it takes you on is actually faster than your preferred route. Rating:  - Love My Tom Tom XL ONEThis thing is great. I just love it. I really like the way it automatically finds your alternate routes when you detour off your main route. My only complaint, and it is very minor is that it can sometimes be hard to read in bright sunlight. Buy this one it will work great for you. Rating: - I call mine Tootsie!Since the voice I chose to use is female, I've renamed my TomTom XLS "Tootsie". We took this on vacation to New Jersey and were never lost. I also use this to get to locations in the "city" since I live in a suburb and don't know the city streets very well. And, OK, I'm directionally challenged and have finally admitted it. I now save face by showing up on time. The extra features I enjoy: car speed (apparently my speedometer is incorrect by 3 mph); estimated arrival time. I'd give this a perfect score except I wish it could pick up GPS signals faster when it's turned on, but that might not be a fault of TomTom. Rating: - Well Rounded GPS unitThis GPS unit seemed to fit everything that I needed: (i) it had a large screen, (ii) it spoke out turn by turn commands, including street names, and (iii) its software was available for macintoshes from the tomtom webpage. The product does all the basic GPS functions well, as do most modern units. These include 2D and 3D maps, spoken warnings for turns, and millions of points of interest. The additional "S" in this unit signifies that it has text to speech capability for road names, this comes at a $50 or so premium over the standard XL. The text to speech works well for most roads, but there are definitely times that the text to speech mangles the street name. The system phonetically pronounces the names of the roads, this can be confusing. This confusion is alleviated because I tend to only want to use this function when I am traveling in unknown areas, where I too would speak street names phonetically. I give this four stars not five, because the interface I wish were more snappy;as it is now, the animations can be choppy. I would rather the machine work smoothly than have millions of points of interest. Rating:  - A very annoying piece of equipment with many many problemsI bought the TomTom One XL-S for the larger screen and text to speech capabilities. I first tested a Garmin 260 text to speech model, but the screen was too small to see at windshield level. I was very surprised at the ease of use of the Garmin and the problems with the TomTom. Both acquire satellites and plan routes with good speed. However the TomTom One was full of undocumented software problems, omissions, inability to find correct routes and ordinary popular chain stores such as Walmart, Sunoco, and many others. More than 50 percent of the time the text to speech is garbled, and you have to guess the street name. The TomTom unit cannot adequately pronounce simple words such as "freeway" or "north high street", etc. "Verrazanno bridge" was totally unintelligible, as was about 30 percent of the streets and destinations. The brightest screen setting washes out in daylight, and is difficult to see. That is a serious problem. The night time screen does not always switch properly to the preprogrammed brightness level. The TomTom One XLS seems to be programmed to recognize only a very limited list of popular businesses, particularly Starbucks, Taco Bell and Pizza Hut, but it misses more than it finds. You can forget about most of the small businesses. I found myself trying to think if an unrecognized location was near a Starbucks or Pizza hut, and used the nearest one to get to my real destination. There might be an update for this, but this is how it comes out of the box. When approaching a turn the unit verbally warns at 2 miles then 1 mile then half a mile then a quarter mile then 200 feet. However, at the turn it does not not use the text to speech to name the street. Annoying. If the GPS satellite signal is lost, it will not tell you in speech, and will take you to the wrong destination if you do not look at the screen and see the pale little letters "lost satellites". The point of interest menu is involved and difficult to use. Canceling the present route requires many steps and is a ridiculous feature, nearly hidden. There is a procedure for enabling text to speech. This must be done manually, the unit does not come enabled. The documentation does not tell you that if you select a preprogrammed voice first and then the computer voice second (which supposedly enables text to speech) the text to speech will never come on at all unless you reset the unit to default factory settings. The unit sometimes defaults to a lower volume probably because the touch area of the volume control overlaps the other screen areas, so when tapping the screen the volume is accidentally reset. Again, very annoying. Normal setting of the volume is simple; click on the lower left of the screen and the control comes up. However it can take a minute or more after increasing the volume for the volume level to respond, and then it suddenly jumps up. If you are riding alone, the shock value can be high. If you select a point of interest without selecting a particular city, the documentation does not tell you must select a city in order for the unit to search more than 2 miles outward for similar POI's. In tapping the screen, often the taps take you past the place you want to go, and usually there is no back button. You will have to do it all over again to go back. The altitude feature just simply does not work, varying several hundred feet driving on level ground. There is a lawyer/legal screen in which you need to agree to not use the unit during driving. Huh? A language problem? The TomTom company is located in the Netherlands (the Garmin unit is made in Taiwan), but the TomTom unit is made and assembled in China. I can only imagine the language iterations this unit has gone through in it's text to speech programming. The suction cup windshield mount holds firmly to the windshield, but will not in any way hold to the dash without the permanent mounting disk. The tongue and groove in the windshield mount holds the unit very tightly, but cannot be undone while it is mounted low on the windshield, necessitating removal of the whole suction cup, which is very, very difficult. I partially solved this problem by putting only one end of the unit into one grove, but this solution is very shaky. I considered putting velcro on the large base of the unit to mount it to the front of the dash, but the power cord enters at the base so this is not possible. Pros? Well, the Help Me! feature is nice, such as Drive to help, Walk to help, Where am I? etc. The Browse Map feature is good, and gives usable area maps. The Bottom Line; Anyone who has never used a GPS before might be impressed at their newfound capability with the TomTom GPS. Anyone who has used another GPS will likely be sorely disappointed and annoyed at the needlessly complicated and often non functional features.
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