Grantovich.net

Despite having attended RIT for two years now, this summer is the first time I’ve had a car in Rochester, and I figured I should have at least a vague idea of where I was going before I put foot to accelerator. Since dead-tree maps are for old people, and I like finding electronic solutions to my problems, I ended up buying a TomTom ONE 130•S, which is about as entry-level as you can get in terms of GPS devices.

I’ve found it to be quite a useful little gadget, and incredibly easy to use at that. It may be an entry-level model, but it doesn’t feel like the features have been deliberately crippled to make you want to upgrade. If you just need to get from point A to point B, the 130 will get the job done with minimal hassle. Mine is the “S” version, which means it can speak the names of streets and highways; the pronounciation is invariably mangled, but it still confers the advantage of knowing what street signs to look for without taking your eyes off the road.

One oddity I noticed was that the speech synthesis frequently says “semicolon” in the middle of highway names. I’m guessing that the underlying map data expects the synthesizer to pause for a beat when it sees a semicolon, instead of saying “semicolon” aloud, but such is not the case. It might also be something weird in the data for Rochester, since I’ve only noticed it here.

Speech glitches aside, the only bad thing I can really say about this TomTom is more about the software that comes with it: It seems very intent on always being loaded in the background, setting itself to run at startup and minimizing to a tray icon when you hit the Close button instead of actually closing. The option to disable the former behavior is unintuitive, and the latter can’t be disabled at all. It seems like a well-made piece of software otherwise, though, so I’m willing to give TomTom the benefit of the doubt, and the device itself has yet to disappoint me in any way.

Interestingly, after being guided along the same route to and from work for a few weeks, I’ve unconsciously memorized the turns to the point where I don’t need the GPS anymore, though I still couldn’t tell you what roads I’m driving on. Excellent procedural memory, terrible semantic memory. Whee!