TomTom ONE 140 -S Car GPS Receiver

I previously upgraded from the TomTom One 130 to this TomTom One 140s for the advanced lane guidance and I absolutely love it.

The spoken street names are nice but no big deal (You have to select a computer voice to get street names. The natural voice can only say pre-recorded things). The names are probably helpful for people who do not want to take their eyes of the road. However, those people will miss the absolute greatest feature which is the advanced lane guidance. It is so nice to get advanced notice that there are multiple lanes coming up and being told very clearly by means of the multiple arrows which lane(s) you can choose. I live in the Seattle area and found that it will show those arrows for nearly all large intersections that have multiple turning lanes. On the freeway you not only get the guidance arrows at the bottom, but frequently a big computer generated picture that clearly depicts all lanes and on/off ramps with big arrows inside the lanes you can choose. It is actually quite shocking when it then switches back to the standard lines view. They feel like cave drawings by comparison. I think it is already technically possible to make this realistic picture view the (moving) permanent view (kind of like a video game). All they need to do is extend their database to include the number of lanes of a road.

Two other improvements over the 130 are that you can add your own Points Of Interest. Although the 130 already allowed you to download locations from Google Maps as Favorites, adding them as POIs will display them on the map just as any other POI and reduce the clutter in your Favorites. The other minor improvement is the ability to create an itinerary. The itinerary is basically a sequence of destinations (with some minor editing capabilities such as adding, removing and moving a destination up or down in the list) which you can save as an itinerary. Just like the 130, the 140s is accurate, quick to draw the screen and recalculate the directions if you stray off course. If you notice after a while that the satellite aquisition is taking longer, connect the TomTom to your PC and update it and the aquisition will be back to a few seconds. I updated my 130 about once a month.

So far I haven't noticed the IQ Routes giving me different routing suggestions than the 130, but I have only had it for a few days and my trips so far may not have required a special IQ re-route. If I notice any specially great or bad routing later, I will add it to this review.