Tom Tom is great. Had several over last few years and never had a problem with any of them.

In a moment of weakness bought a Binatone as it was half the price of the Tom Tom but it is a hundred times slower acquiring GPS signals than Tom Tom but OK when running but wish I had bought a Tom Tom.

Edited 19 October, 201015 yr by lol

TomTom's used to be good but their mapping accuracy leaves much to be desired.

I've had 4 different units. First was the PDA from Aldi with a aerial/receiver attachment. Brilliant, but a bit insensitive. Because it was a programmable device, I managed to make it do all sorts of things, and the family loved the voices. Soothing lady for directions, German disciplinarian lady for the camera warnings. Snag was that it needed the 12volts from the car to work at all and so you couldn't really program or interrogate it out of the car.

Now using a Garmin in the Discovery and a Magellan Roadmate in the Octy. Both just sit loose in the centre console area of the car and work fine. The Garmin is the one I prefer, as the audio quality is quite good (I rarely look at the screen on either of them). We have a couple of double roundabouts here, and it doesn't announce the second direction order in time for you to do anything. This isn't the speed of the processing, it's the way it queues the announcements, I think. This has the funny little aerial for traffic warnings etc. Round here it seemed to be working but never gave any worthwhile info, so I've stopped using that feature.

The Magellan audio is poor, and it seems slower at processing than the Garmin. It also has a system of bings and bongs to alert you to various things. I can never remember whether it's bing bong for left or bong bing for right. And the other bells and things alarm the passengers and don't seem to be mentioned in the instructions. There are normal voice instructions as well, so it's usable. I tried to edit the audio files, but they are in some weird unknown format

Both get me to places, both were cheap and refurbished, but the Garmin is better.

Try a bean bag mount such as the Nav-Mat, Nav Mat II or Garmin Bean Bag Mount.

Garmin

Nav-Mat II

Nav-Mat

I've got the Nav Mat & Garmin mounts + Windscreen suction mount for both units. The pro of using the mats are no rings on the windscreen, so potential thieves don't know if you have one, the con is that they're quite heavy & a bit bulky, but work very well.

TomTom's used to be good but their mapping accuracy leaves much to be desired.

Have you not got the map updates ? Its great 4 new maps per year - Can't fault it

Never had a problem - and the auto-reroute seems lots better in the Tom Tom than the Garmin

Sorry I cannot possibly agree. There are numerous errors in the mapping some of which are over two years old.

For the amount of money they charge for the map updates you'd expect them to be accurate, they're not.

Where I live the idiots who did the map have given it a wrong name & made it a through road towards the next village, it's not even suitable for a 4x4! A enduro/motocross bike maybe, although that's illegal to use on the track up there!

They got the junction wrong at the bottom of the road too, mind you the Garmin was wrong there as well, but that's since been corrected. Tom Toms are user-friendly, however the mapping isn't & until they do something about it I for one won't be paying any money for the so called map updates.

(It will be interesting to see how long it takes them to put the new A3 Hindhead Tunnel on when it opens in the spring/summer of 2011!)

Have you not got the map updates ? Its great 4 new maps per year - Can't fault it

Never had a problem - and the auto-reroute seems lots better in the Tom Tom than the Garmin

Yeah, 4 updates a year that still have the roundabout not far from where my daughter lives as a crossroads, it only changed 3 years ago...

The others aren't much better, found plenty of errors with my Garmin and Navigon units too but you can pretty much guarantee that even the latest maps from all manufacturers have errors and will be 6 months out of date...

At the end of the day they are all much the same. Its down to Styling, Price and Useability.

You could ask what's your favourite meal and get the same kind of response. He likes this, she like that, this smells funny , that tastes great, blah blah blah.

What you should do is take a look at the devices recommended and go see them, go play. Perhaps also take a look at totalpda.co.uk and get a right old bargain.

Yeah, 4 updates a year that still have the roundabout not far from where my daughter lives as a crossroads, it only changed 3 years ago...

The others aren't much better, found plenty of errors with my Garmin and Navigon units too but you can pretty much guarantee that even the latest maps from all manufacturers have errors and will be 6 months out of date...

Have you reported them?

I've found Garmin to be pretty good at updating stuff you report to them. I've no experience with TomTom to compare.