I bought a new TomTom One GPS navigation device today. It's pretty cool, quite small but not too small to be illegible and pretty smooth in terms of screen & map refresh. I've been toying with the idea of buying one for a while but I've not been very keen on the form factors available todate, but this newly released TomTom One model looks pretty good.
The inbuilt manufacturer's SatNav system for my Merc would have cost more than a couple of grand as an option - so, not really an option - but my previous car, a beemer, back in 2002 had inbuilt satnav of the simplistic symbol / arrow / voice kind which I found very useful in my first couple of years living in England and Fiona's car has satnav built in too, so I'm not entirely new to the concept. But I figured that £280 was pretty cheap and cheerful and, after a spate of getting lost incidents lately, today the stereotypicaltight frugal Scottish person I've progressively turned into finally relented and coughed up the dough.
Ideally I would have liked live traffic updates - you can actually get them via Bluetooth on the TomTom One but I don't think my BlackBerry 7100's Bluetooth services are capable (without fiddling about with it to confirm) - but I reckoned that if a newer model with inbuilt traffiic updates comes out in the next twelve months, then I'd sell this one on eBay and upgrade, like the rusting early adopter I used to be in my youth. So, I quickly and recklessly rationalised £280 down less its future resale value and - bang - the deal was done first psychologically and then promptly consumated fiscally. I also downloaded the humourous John Cleese voice pack for it for six quid - for a very good reason.
As an aside, TomTom's latest financial results for Q3 show a five fold increase in turnover over the 12 months period, so I reckon portable SatNav systems have now hit the famed inflection point and are set for a couple of years more of explosive growth. If only I'd bought some stock when the price was cheap as chips...
The inbuilt manufacturer's SatNav system for my Merc would have cost more than a couple of grand as an option - so, not really an option - but my previous car, a beemer, back in 2002 had inbuilt satnav of the simplistic symbol / arrow / voice kind which I found very useful in my first couple of years living in England and Fiona's car has satnav built in too, so I'm not entirely new to the concept. But I figured that £280 was pretty cheap and cheerful and, after a spate of getting lost incidents lately, today the stereotypical
Ideally I would have liked live traffic updates - you can actually get them via Bluetooth on the TomTom One but I don't think my BlackBerry 7100's Bluetooth services are capable (without fiddling about with it to confirm) - but I reckoned that if a newer model with inbuilt traffiic updates comes out in the next twelve months, then I'd sell this one on eBay and upgrade, like the rusting early adopter I used to be in my youth. So, I quickly and recklessly rationalised £280 down less its future resale value and - bang - the deal was done first psychologically and then promptly consumated fiscally. I also downloaded the humourous John Cleese voice pack for it for six quid - for a very good reason.
As an aside, TomTom's latest financial results for Q3 show a five fold increase in turnover over the 12 months period, so I reckon portable SatNav systems have now hit the famed inflection point and are set for a couple of years more of explosive growth. If only I'd bought some stock when the price was cheap as chips...