TomTom XL 350TM 4.3-Inch Portable GPS Navigator (Lifetime Traffic and Maps Edition)
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XL 350TM 4.3″ Auto GPS Navigation Unit
Get street smart with the TomTom XL 350·TM–complete widescreen navigation, featuring Lifetime Traffic and Map Updates*. Enjoy a lifetime of easy driving with two great features from TomTom. Lifetime Maps guarantees you receive four new editions of your TomTom map each year to ensure that you are always navigating with the industry’s most up-to-date map. And, Lifetime Traffic automatically sends real-time updates to your TomTom, so you can always steer clear of traffic delays and take the fastest route possible to your destination.
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.
Lifetime Traffic & Map Updates
Enjoy a lifetime of easy driving with two great features from TomTom. LIFETIME Maps guarantees you receive four new editions of your TomTom map each year to ensure that you are always navigating with the industry’s most up-to-date map. And, LIFETIME Traffic automatically sends real-time updates to your TomTom, so you can always steer clear of traffic delays and take the fastest route possible to your destination.
Note: You receive non-transferable traffic data and up to four non-transferable map data updates per year until the product’s useful life expires or TomTom no longer receives map or traffic updates from its suppliers, whichever is shorter. Details and terms at www.tomtom.com/legal.
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. Easi
Features
- Preloaded with maps of the US, Canada, and Mexico, with Lifetime Map Updates (new editions four times a year)
- Lifetime Traffic Updates included–outsmart traffic and avoid delays for life with real-time information via your TomTom
- 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
- Dimensions (W x H x L): 5 x 3 x 1 inches
- Weight: 0 pounds
great gps
First of all the is am entry leve gps. My wife purchased it for me for fathers day. I used it and it works great right out of the box. I did delete the other languages (not needed for me), performed the LONG SLOW update that took about 1hr 45min. Used it for work —the traffic worked well. Please remember this is a no thrills gps gets you to point A—B. Other people that posted comments must not have read the product description. All the features that this gps has is right on TOMTOM’s website. All the ADVANCED features that this gps doesn’t have are on higher priced gps’s. My wife only paid $129.99 from BestBuy a week before fathers day. This is a graet gps that is accurate and has a nice basic feature set. If you want a basic gps that has lifetime maps and traffic — get this gps.
Great value, but…
PROS: great price and features
CONS: frustrating to use at times, simple things omitted
The TomTom XL 350 price can’t be beat. For $129, you get lifetime traffic and maps, and that is unheard of. There is also lane assist and full junction view, both great add-ons at this price. Satellite acquisition is fast and the routing seems intelligent. The traffic service is Clear Channel as opposed to Navteq and, in the Philly area, that is a MASSIVE upgrade. You get a signal everywhere and it is a help. The unit overall is fast, especially doing POI searches. The desktop software is clean and easy to use, which is a good thing.
Based on the above items, I’d recommend the unit. However, there is a whole laundry list of maddening items:
- Why can’t I view the route turn-by-turn?
- Where is the 2D view with rotating north?
- Why are there next to no options? (I can’t turn off a toll road warning on a route?)
- Where is the Mute option?
- Why can’t I list all traffic events in text view?
- Why can’t I zoom on the route or traffic map?
- Why is the keyboard so awful? And by “awful”, I mean “AWFUL”!!!!! Non-responsive, inaccurate, etc…
- Why is scrolling the map next to impossible?
- When searching POI’s by name, why doesn’t it return the location? Search “Starbucks” and you get 30 hits with mileage, but no town or anything.
- In general, too many buttons to press to do anything.
- The power plug is awkward to insert and remove and the mount isn’t that easy to deal with either.
- I needed to manually uninstall unused files (as will you) in order to upgrade my maps. That is a MAJOR BUG and they should be embarrassed it was let out.
It is my sincere hope that some of these items can be fixed with some firmware updates.
Overall, I’d buy it again, but I really need to question TomTom on some pretty basic omissions and flaws.
TOMTOM XL350 TM – Stripped Down GPS
I bought it two days go. As mentioned in the previous review, there are many features missing such as:
01. There is no route option. You can not select Shortest / Fastest options
02. You can not avoid any roads
03. You can not view the driving direction in the Text format
04. Multiple destinations are not allowed
05. In the POI, sub categories are not available. If you want to find out only American Restaurants, it is not possible. It lists all the restaurants around
The only advantage of this GPS is, It has lifetime Traffic and Map update. I have no idea why tomtom removed most of the above useful features. Sure, this GPS is going back to the store.
A great GPS for a great price
I travel a lot for my job and have used an older model Mio GPS unit to get me to my destinations. The Mio worked fine for the most part, but the last time I went to a new city the maps were very old and out of date. I decided it was time to upgrade to a new GPS unit and researched Garmin and TomToms because they are the two biggest players in the market. In the end, the lifetime traffic and lifetime map upgrades pushed me towards the TomTom XL 350 TM, a model that just came out at the end of May 2010.
In my research for a new GPS it seems that people either liked Garmin or the TomTom because of the interface. People usually had a strong bias for one or the other. The interface did not matter to me as much as what I could get for my money. I seriously looked at the Garmin nuvi 780 because this is a top-of-the-line Garmin, albeit a discontinued model, and Amazon is selling it for 74% off the original price. For the money it seemed like a fantastic deal except for two things. This unit uses MSN Direct content for traffic and you have to pay a subscription fee after the trial period ends, and MSN is discontinuing this service at the beginning of 2011. This unit did not include lifetime updated maps, which is a big deal for someone buying a new GPS unit simply because the old one had maps in it that are getting obsolete.
Since lifetime maps were very important to me (without having to shell out $100 more for the upgrade) my choices were suddenly locked in on TomTom units. I researched their products and decided I was either going to get the XL 540 TM (the TM is lifetime traffic and maps) or the same unit but with a smaller screen size, the XL 340 TM. I decided I was going to go for the one with the 4.3″ wide screen, the XL 340 TM, instead of the bigger 5″ screen because I read that the 5″ screen is cumbersome for the window mount to handle.
Well the best laid plans sometimes go astray because when I went into Best Buy they had the brand new XL 350 TM on sale for $169.99 when the regular price was $229.99. I bought the unit immediately beacuse I figured the unit was very similar if not an improvement over the XL 340 TM.
Here are my first impressions after using the TomTom XL 350 TM for two days.
1. The design is sleek with a crisp and clear screen. My old Mio looks like a clunky old refrigerator compared to the new TomTom.
2. I wish TomTom had an external memory card on these units. I have read people have had problem updating maps because they have run out of room on the unit. Since I read about it, I was expecting it, and ended up backing up my unit and then deleting the French and the Spanish language functions to free up space. This freed up about 30 mb on a 2 gb flash drive. TomTom could fix this issue by simply making the maps of Canada, the United States and Mexico separate. Anyway, the fix of deleting the French and Spanish speaking files worked well.
3. The instructions are very skimpy in the box. There are basically no instructions on how to set up and install the new software on the device. This was not a big deal for me because I researched the hell out of it, but for someone like my mom this would be a killer. I connected the device to my computer and found the setup program on the device and ran it.
4. When you first plug the unit into the computer it takes an hour and a half to download the new maps and the GPS fix software. After it downloads all the software it needs, then you install the TomTom Home software. This is not really installed on your machine, but rather it is an account set up on a web site and the software seems to reside there.
5. Once you install the Home software or set up an account, the icons in TomTom Home are very easy to understand and use. I performed a backup of my unit and then I deleted the Spanish and French language files from the unit. If TomTom would ever install Mexico, Canada and the United States separately then space would not be an issue because most sane people would never rent a car or drive in Mexico unless you lived there, and then if you did liver in Mexico you most likely would not need maps of Canada. This is a very small issue but one that could be fixed with minimal issues.
6. Once you perform the backup and delete you install the software upgrade to the TomTom. This did not take long at all, maybe 15 minutes.
7. The window unit is very different from the Mio. I like the looks of it because it looks elegant. It is a little awkward to use at first, but after you get used to it then it works as designed. My Mio had a linchpin system to hold the unit to the window unit and over time I lost the linchpin so the design there wasn’t perfect. This design is like a hip joint, a ball in the socket, and although it moves stiff (I bet in order to keep the GPS unit still) it functions well and had no problems holding the unit on the window or dash. It is easy to unsnap the unit from the wondow mounting device so you can take the GPS unit with you instead of leaving it in the car.
8. The user interface on the GPS unit is simple and easy to use. It is very intuitive and when you fist turn it on there are pop-up balloons there to help guide you through the process. By playing around with it for a bit I became very adept at doing what I needed to get done for the GPS unit to function.
9. I like the graphics on this unit. The GPS fired up and found a signal within seconds (my old unit took up to a minute or so to lock onto a satellite). I typed in the address of where I wanted to go, it plotted a route for me, and I hit the done button to get the 3-D view map on the screen. From there it is easy because you follow the prompts. The section on the bottom of the screen tells you which way your next turn will be(left or right) and it tells you how far away from the turn you are at the moment. This unit is accurate to within 5 feet or so of where my car was so it would be very hard to miss a turn. My old unit was only locked in from about 20 yards, which caused problems sometimes when I was on a freeway and passed my exit going 70.
10. I have not been able to get lane assist to work yet (I only drove local routes). This is part of the reason I bought this unit. From the pictures on other reviews it looks great.
11. I have no clue on how the routing is compared to my old unit yet. I will get a better judge of this over time. I like it a lot so far.
12. The screen is absolutely bright enough to see in the daytime. The sound is loud enough to hear the spoken street names and directions.
Overall I highly recommend this unit. If anything changes in the next few months I will come in and update my review.
This XL 350TM is below my expectation
I am a user of TomTom GPS for many years. I have models GO910 and GO730. I bought XL-350TM because of its life time traffic and map updates and my good experience with their GPS. This is a lower end model that doesn’t have mp3, video, FM, blue tooth etc. That’s ok. I have better devices for that. I just need GPS feature. However after playing it for awhile, I am quite disappointed. Here is why:
1) The touch screen is difficult to use. It’s very sluggish and unresponsive. It is so frustrating to brows the map.
2) There is no text instruction of the planned route. So you don’t know which freeway/highway you are going to take unless you brows the map, which is so difficult.
3) There is no “shortest route” selection as alternatives. I agree that most time “shortest route” is pretty stupid. But users need to get an idea on the shortest way and plan route around it to balance speed and distance.
4) There is no itineray features. You spend all the time to plan a route and cannot save and reuse it?
5) You cannot avoid an area, such as avoid the roads through New York.
6) You cannot save your own POI by categories.
7) searching POI doesn’t return much. I would prefer to wait a few seconds more to cover larger area.
All these above features existed in the models that I use. In my view, this new device is only useful for those who just want to type in an address and follow the directions. Anyone who wants to do more than that, such as examine the route or plan a different one, it is difficult to use.
June 13, 2010
Returned the XL340TM today and checked other models in the store. The higher end model TomTom Go740 still has the functionalities above. Seems TomTom stripped too much in their lower end model. Checked some Garmin models. Overall, I still likes TomTom Go740 better.
I would like to find a GPS that can provide following. Not sure if there are any available on the market:
A) an option to display miles to the next “rest area” (or other POI, such as McDonalds) on the screen. Currently you can do a “Find…”, but that requires working on GPS while driving, which is dangerous.
B) Warn user if it will be difficult to find gas stations ahead, such as before entering mountain area or desert.
C) An alternative route method that balance driving time and distance. The “fastest” route to an airport my GPS finded was 1 minute faster than another route, but needs to drive 10 more miles. One way is to let user input a prefered conversion ratio, something like “It’s ok to drive 1 more minutes if that can save me 5 miles”.