Foreign Perspectives

We’ve recently had the opportunity to try out the latest versions of both these satnav systems over the last couple of weeks ie the sensibly priced Tomtom One v3 and the Garmin Nuvi 250W.

On a first comparison, the Tomtom seems the better of the two in that the menus offer a lot more options compared to the Garmin model. However, the majority of those extra options are to do with things like changing the voice and various non-navigation related features. There’s also a range of display related options letting you add the current speed, max speed, time remaining and so on where the Garmin just shows your speed and projected arrival time and next turn. OK, so you’ll play around with all those extra options but realistically the arrival time (or the time remaining) plus your next turn is all you actually need and, in general, that’s the theme for the Garmin: it gives you the information that you need without all the extraneous information that the Tomtom provides.

One key difference though is that the Tomtoms don’t have a memory card slot whereas the Garmin do. With the increasing range of maps available these days and all the extra detail that comes out with each new version that’s a builtin obselence on the part of the Tomtom which is going to cost you dear sooner or later. For example, if you get the Tomtom One single-country version you’ll find that you’re stuck with the map that’s preloaded because the machine hasn’t got enough memory to load any other countries. In the equivalently priced Garmin you have an SD slot which would let you load maps of a continent if you wanted to. If you buy Tomtom UK and would like to add the European maps for the holidays, you can’t.

Incidently, on the map pricing front, it’s probably better to spend the extra £30 upfront to get the European maps rather than run with the UK only ones. The European maps, of course, include the UK. If you’re going for the Tomtom, you have to make this decision at the outset but you could add a memory card for the extra maps in the Garmin.

Overall, I prefer the current Tomtom software but that lack of a memory card means that you’ll be throwing it away in a few years when the maps grow too large when paying £5 or so will get you a very large memory card these days and upgrade your Garmin to hold much larger maps.

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