TomTom XL 350 4.3-Inch Portable GPS Navigator
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XL 350 4.3″ Auto GPS Navigation Unit
The TomTom XL 350 is complete widescreen navigation–and, since TomTom has the industry’s most accurate and dependable maps, you’ll have access to one million more miles of roads than you would using other GPS brands. Navigate to any location in the US, Canada or Mexico–or directly to one of 7 million preloaded points of interest. Finding your way has never been easier, using TomTom’s new EasyMenu and spoken turn-by-turn instructions including street names.
Maps of US, Canada & Mexico
TomTom is known the world over for the accuracy and extensive coverage of its maps. TomTom maps include 1 million more miles of road than other GPS brands and have been rated highest in terms of quality and reliability.
EasyMenu
Easily access all of TomTom’s powerful features through its simple and intuitive two-button menu. Just a tap gets you started, and easy-to-follow commands and recognizable icons lead you through a quick start-up process to get you on the road in no time.
7 million Points of Interest
Comes preloaded with more than 7 million points of interest in over 60 categories. Easily find millions of gas stations, restaurants, hotels and more on your route. Or, seek out a new tourist attraction, nightlife spot or shopping center and navigate directly to it. Customize by adding your own favorites.
IQ Routes*
Despite posted speed limits, traffic traveling along a road at 8 a.m. moves at a different pace than it does at 2 p.m. Actual traffic speed is affected by rush hour, traffic light changes, pedestrian traffic, day of the week, and more. Only TomTom offers exclusive technology that evaluates routes based on actual traffic speeds, rather than posted speed limits, and will recommend the fastest route for the time of the day.
Advanced Lane Guidance**
TomTom provides extra clarity when navigating difficult junctions by showing you which lane to take, so you won’t miss you
Features
- Preloaded with maps of the US, Canada, and Mexico, complete with Map Share technology for easy modification and updates
- More than 7 million points of interest in over 60 destination categories–gas stations, restaurants, hotels, ATMs and more
- IQ Routes Technology calculates the fastest route possible based on time of day, saving you time, fuel and money
- Advanced Lane Guidance indicates exactly which lane to use, so you can go confidently
- Announces turn-by-turn directions aloud, including street and place names
- Dimensions (W x H x L): 5 x 3 x 1 inches
- Weight: 0 pounds
TomTom gets way better; nearly perfect basic GPS.
Summary: TomTom XL 350 is a great, easy to use GPS. The large screen is easy to read, and the ability to speak road names makes it much more useful than older models that could only play pre-recorded phrases. Very easy to do all the basic navigation things, and a great 3-D or 2-D map display. Routes are basic (default or “alternate”) and some minor niceties from other GPS brands not present, but overall, the best TomTom I have used to date. I would highly recommend to anyone who wants to get an easy to use, inexpensive GPS. Updatable content via internet (voices, etc.) is a fun plus (want your GPS to speak like a redneck? Darth Vader?). Near perfect!
The Review… First, my GPS background.
I bought my first GPS system around 1996. It was a Delorme Tripmate — large yellow box that plugged up to a serial port on a PC/Windows laptop, then software from CD was loaded on the PC for maps and robotic speech. I made many trips with the laptop seatbelted in my passenger seat. It was a great introduction to GPS technology.
Much has changed since those early days of consume GPS systems — including pricing. In the years the followed, standalone dedicated devices game out, such as the Garmin GPS V which I bought for $300 from Best Buy. This was a tiny black and white unit (with no voice!) that had such limited memory, you had to connect it to a PC and load maps in to it before each trip. Slowly. Over serial port. It was so slow that if you missed a turn while, say, driving through Kansas City, you would be out of luck as the device took so much time to recalculate, you’d miss your next turn
Fast forward to the 2000s, and TomTom is all the rave with a clever radio marketing campaign that just makes it sound so… nifty. I purchased an early cheap TomTom as a gift for a friend back around 2006. It was very basic and simple, but did the job (mostly). A few years later, I bought a TomTom One for another friend (GPS units make GREAT Christmas and birthday gifts). This unit was slightly improved, but still pretty close to the basic TomTom experience.
Overall, I liked the TomTom, but thought my Garmin had some better routing capabilities (just slower and worst screen and no speech). The TomTom failed me, though, when being used in Southern California. It’s lack of ability to speak street names made the voice guidance almost useless as it kept giving such generic “keep on the right” and “next right” instructions it was hard to figure out which of the dozens of exits it meant.
With that in mind, I must say, I am VERY impressed with how far TomTom has advanced in short time. There have always been higher end models (with a higher price) that could read out street names (usually an “S” model, indicating speech). This is a VERY important feature, which makes the navigation systems in a Honda Fit or Toyota Prius have an edge even if the TomTom experience was still more user friendly than either of those multi-thousand dollar factory add-ons.
The TomTom 350 XL has a nice, wide screen, which is very easy to read. They have improved the graphics and now you get a nice 3-D vied of the road ahead and upcoming turns (you can change the car marker to pictures of, say, a VW Beetle or even custom graphics you can load in yourself). Tape the bottom of the screen and it switches to a traditional 2-D North-Up map view. In this mode, it zooms in as you get near intersections, then zooms out when you are on longer stretches of roadway. Nice! (The Garmin did that; but I don’t recall many others having that feature.)
Strike: I still cannot figure out how to toggle the 2-D map in to “Forward” mode — where “up” is always the direction you are traveling, not always North. Many folks have trouble reading maps sideways, and I am one of them. Maybe this feature is in there, but the included documentation was almost nonexistent and I couldn’t figure it out from menus anywhere.
You can easily set destinations by name, address, or moving a pointer on the map. Unlike past TomToms, you can now easily scroll the map by dragging a finger across the screen, similar to an iPhone or iPad (but no multitouch support for zooming; that’s done through + and – icons on the corner). You can swap the device for LEFT HANDED or RIGHT HANDED operation, which is a bonus when it comes to punching things in.
You can also search for things like Gas Stations (categories/points of interest) or turn on selected icons on the map. I leave mine displaying certain gas stations I like and ATM machines, for example. Just basic GPS stuff, really.
When you drive, the display will light up with arrows indicating which lane you should be in! This is great — on a four lane highway with a right hand exit, the display shows four up arrows and a right arrow (of a different color). At freeway intersections, a 3-D graphical representation of the roadway appears with the lanes clearly marked (and blinking to tell you which ones you should be in to avoid missing an exit). VERY VERY NICE.
The voice prompts are GREAT — telling you things like “turn right, then turn left” (so you know you’ll need to stay in a left lane). It will also tell you exit numbers AND the names of the places you are going — “exit 2, pavilion avenue” or whatever. Again, VERY NICE. It even tells you areas of town — as I near an exit I take regularly, Clive Iowa, it will tell me “towards Clive”. Sweet.
TomTom is famous for having custom voices you can load in to the device, and even shows you how you can make your own with free tools you can download. The pre-made voices are mostly commercial (you can buy celebrity voices, like Mister T or Darth Vader or even Homer Simpson) and the community has created hundreds of free (some great, some awful) voices to try out. I like the pirate and the southern redneck voice. Great fun, but gets tiring real fast since there is a very limited amount of phrases they can say. The computer voice sounds very realistic and gives far more practical information.
So, play with the voices for a gag and fun, then switch back to computer speech for real navigation.
The unit comes with a window mount that suction cupped right to my glass and has stayed. The unit pops on and off easily and a mini USB cable is provided to sync with a PC or Mac, and a car adapter for power it in the car. There are batteries to and the unit will run for awhile without being plugged up — great if you hop in someones car and need to navigate for an hour or so without a cable on you. (Option accessory: buy the carrying case, and order a screen protector from [...]).
Strike: When routing, you have a primary and alternate route, and that is it. I could not find out how to select “shortest” route — this is important to me, since one place I travel is 15 miles away, taking 16 minutes. There is a 10 mile route my Prius will suggest, that takes 17 minutes, so driving there and back each time on “shortest” only takes a minute longer, but saves me 10 miles on my car lease (and less gas — do that daily and by the end of the year, and that’s a ton of savings in gas). The TomTOm may have this feature, but I sure couldn’t find it.
Also missing (or I couldn’t find it) — speed notification! Older TomToms has some beep you could turn on to warn if you were driving faster than the speed limit of the road you were on (according to map data). I miss this, and wonder if it’s hiding in there somewhere. The menus seem very light compared to older, cheaper TomToms.
Most things you do take only a few presses on the screen, but sometimes backing from one menu to another is a bit more work than you feel it should be — I think the iPhone/iPad/etc. has spoiled me when it comes to touch screens. Overall, though, it’s easier to use than either the Honda or Toyota navigation systems, and in many ways better (but built in car systems have some advantages — larger screen, voice recognition, etc.) The TomTom has no such integration — phone call comes in, and you have to tap the screen and mute the volume (while a built in Nav would do that for you if you were using car bluetooth handsfree).
TomTom Home software is available free, but the link given in the short getting started manual was to a page that didn’t exist. It took a few minutes of searching to find the download (and I reported this error to TomTom, but a week later still haven’t had my ticket acknowledged). THe software lets you purchase map updates (but you get one free if a newer one comes out or is already out within 30 days of buying the unit — I got an instant map update for mine). You can also buy add ons, like listings of traffic cameras and such. Higher end TomToms can do traffic guidance and stuff too, but nothing like that in this little one.
And a word about route planning — you can do complex routing with the device, loading in multiple destinations on a trip, but I did not figure this out. Also, they use some kind of “IQ” intelligent route planning that will take traffic and time of day in to consideration, meaning it shouldn’t take you down a main downtown street during rush hours — using an alternate route instead. When I think back to all the times on a long road trip that my Garmin (or older TomTom) took us THROUGH Kansas City instead of around it, thinking “hey, it’s all interstate and this is shorter!”, I can say this feature — if it really works — is worth the price alone
GREAT features in this device, and TomTOm is the brand I recommend to anyone I know just getting started. It’s a widespread brand that is everywhere and I probably know more people with TomToms than any other specific type of GPS system.
Not much else to see — other than two missing features, overall it’s a great device. Even though I have a high end GPS system built in to my 2010 Toyota Prius (with voice recognition and many features the TomTom doesn’t have), I wanted a TomTom to take with me on car rental trips, or when riding with others. I plan to buy a carrying case for it and keep it in my travel bag. (Just remember to plug it up to TomTom Home software now and then and get the latest updates, software, graphics, etc.)
Buy one.
A note about customization: TomTom gives you access to some cool features, like making your own voices to navigate by (a cumbersome, long process, but doable with patience and a microphone). You can also customize the graphic shown for startup and shutdown — I like to put my photo and name/contact information on the device so if anyone steels it, they will know it clearly advertises it’s not their unit (hoping they aren’t smart enough to figure out how to change the screen). You can even download or make your own icons for navigation — want a pirate ship? a trans am? Prius? Make your own or download some of the hundred free ones.
For folks who like to tweak their PC desktop wallpaper, you will like what you can do with the TomTom.
Lucky
I must have lucked out with this, as I had no problems getting the system mounted and up and running. It is not the absolute best navigation system I have ever owned, but for the price I think it is pretty solid. You can’t discount the slew of negative reviews for the product, but also take a look at some of the comments for the reviews to get some of the answers to the problems some of the people seem to have.
Much dumber than expected
I had a TOM TOM one, a few years old, and was tired of not having accurate maps, although I was happy with the unit otherwise, so I bought into this unit with free lifetime maps, thinking that newer more expensive units would also be better in all regards, what electronic device these days isn’t better and cheaper every year? This unit is not better, it is much dumber than my TOM TOM ONE. This is cheap trick by TOMTOM and they don’t deserve a lot of people buying this. It’s behavior seems erratic at times, and previous posts here are true in what they say.
Too many issues right out of the box
I had a chance to try out my new TomTom XL350TM over the holiday weekend. During the setup, I noticed the touch screen sensitivity was off. I had to touch the screen 1/4″-1/2″ to the left of the desired letter or icon to select it. That gets really old when using the keyboard.
Once I got everything set up, everytime I navigated away from the map screen and returned, the volume would be muted. That’s fun too.
So I’m driving down the road and decide to use the POI feature to look for a popular restaurant. I type in the name and it comes up as being 15.7 miles away. The only problem is that where it was telling me to go was actually about 60 miles away. Yes, I am from the area I’m talking about, so there is no mistaking this. I gave it another try to see if the results would improve, and this time is told me that the particular restaurant and many others were anywhere from 60 yards to 500 yards away. I am in the middle of nowhere and this is what it tells me. Thank god I wasn’t actually depending on this thing.
Finally, when trying to type in an address for a new destination, the keyboard suddenly changed to a language other than English with a completely different alphabet. Icing. Shipped back, bought a Garmin.
READ THIS*** IMPROPER DESIGN ON MOUNTING SYSTEM
The mounting system on this device is not designed properly. The suction device is designed to twist and generate enough suction, but it doesn’t allow the suction cup in the middle to higher enough to generate suction. I can’t speak for the navigation system itself, since we couldn’t even get this mounted. NOT operator error as I have installed many different devices of this type. In short, look for another system that is designed properly
TomTom 350 is a “Dumbed Down” GPS
I am very disappointed at this dumbed down unit that according to TomTom support (if you can call it that) said that the new TomToms are a result of the poll that was taken last year where people did not want features but simply wanted to get from A-B with IQ routes.
This unit is so bad that it does not allow you to see where you are AND then save it as a favorite. Although it is has lifetime maps/traffic it is not even in the same league as my Garmin 1350T and I too using the touch screen have had to retouch to get it to go to the correct response.
The TomTom never says “recalculating” but in a few seconds will simply tell you at times to turn right or left and then sometimes will tell you to turn right/left on the street name.
Like all TomTom units if you have arthritis it is very hard to disconnect the USB Or the Car Power cord from the unit once it is there because of its right angle approach to connections.
What I dislike most about this unit is that it does NOT let you see what streets your route is going to be taking you on for your trip before you start whereas the older TT units allowed you to see a demo of the route at up to 5x actually speed.
The instruction manual is also dumbed down to the point of being almost worthless and I could not find a telephone # for support in it. Interestingly enough when I called TomTom for advice on getting another TomTom with more features, the rep had to ask someone else for information and then gave out wrong information after all.
As others have said, Before I start my trip, I like to visually look at the directions and decide if I want to go that route. XL350 does not have the “Fastest or Shortest route”. I know the XL350TM has the lifetime traffic capability, but, I have discovered that the shortest route, at times, has a lot less traffic than the “fastest” route in the area where I live. XL350TM also is missing the “walking route”. My XLS has that feature. XL350TM does not have the many preferences as my current XLS and I cannot find a way of avoiding a particular road during the route since there is no way to see what the roads are going to be as with units such as a Garmin.
No choice of routes
I purchased this model with lifetime traffic and maps from a competing online store that had it in stock before Amazon. I’ve been using the same tomtom for about 4 years now, and although I’ve been very happy with it, I was eager to have traffic updates and advanced lane guidance. The functionality of this model is great, and the small size is nice. The touchscreen seems to be of a lesser quality than my older model, but it is still useable.
Unfortunately, this model seems to be missing the option to avoid highways or take the shortest – rather than fastest – route. I’ve read the manuals, looked online and checked every setting, and unless I’m missing something obvious, it’s just not a choice. This is a major omission, in my opinion. I imagine most people won’t miss it, but for people who absolutely have to avoid highways at times, this is not a good choice. I’ll be giving this to a family member and finding a different model for me.
Please comment on this review if you have figured out how to avoid highways, rather than just rely on the IQ routes. I keep hoping I’m just overlooking an option.