TomTom ONE 140 S 3 5 Inch Portable GPS Navigator
A GPS helps you find your way and, having a Tomtom One140S in your car, is an excellent way to help you find the right direction toward your destination, The TomTom One 140S GPS with North American maps puts smart navigation at your fingertips. The TomTom One 140S’s EasyPort mount fits neatly onto the back of the device, making the whole navigation packet fit into your pocket, bag or glove compartment. And the TomTom One 140S couldn’t be simpler to use, just plug it in and tap on the touch screen. You’ll be on your way very quickly with the 140S’s intuitive User interface as it guides you door-to-door with turn-by-turn spoken instructions including street and place names. Battery – Rechargeable internal 3 hour Li-Ion battery Unit Dimensions (H x W x D in inches) – 3.0 x 3.6 x 0.8 in Unit Weight – 6.8 oz. (including mount) In-the-Box – ONE 140S Device, Fold & Go EasyPort Mount, Adhesive Mounting Disk, USB Cable, Cigarette Lighter Adaptor, Documentation Pack
User Ratings and Reviews
1 Star did not work
My son got this for graduation. The first thing the manual said to do was get on the internet and download updates. Well somehow it sucked all data from the tomtom. Calles customer support and they tried to help but anything wwe did did not fix it. Sent it back to AMazon for refund
4 Stars Map Update Service
The unit is very good. I do have a major gripe. I decided on this unit because of the 1 year of quarterly map updates for $39.95. Tried to buy this service – found out it is not available for the 140S. Yet? Do not know what other models do not have this service. Yet?
1 Star Absolute failure for Tomtom
We bought this soon after it was introduced and there was only one review for it on Amazon which rated it quite highly. So we took a chance and bought it – given that the Cnet review was also quite gaga over its *all new* IQ routes feature.
I’d like to begin by saying that I still like the TomTom display better than Garmin. It tells you how many miles are left, when you will arrive, what time it is, your speed, the speed limit – everything you need right there at all times at the bottom of the screen. Having said that, I have nothing good to say about the 140S. For this price, you can get several Garmin models (I have not used Magellan) that perform much better.
Here’re a list of fundamental problems with the 140S:
#1. The text to speech feature was very important to us in choosing a GPS. The 140S is unable to “speak” words correctly even with the (only two preloaded) computer voices. Example – “Downtown” is “tatown”. We noticed that it would pronounce only two syllables or five letters of each word/street name. Some reviewers seem to not be troubled by its inability to pronounce words, but then why pay extra for that feature? I am sure many would agree that when using a GPS, the T-to-S feature is essential, esp. in unfamiliar settings.
#2. If two announcements are back to back, the 140S truncates the first one to get to the second one so you are left wondering what you missed at crucial junctures of unfamiliar roads.
#3. It takes forever to find GPS signals – we were not in some rural area either. This was in the heart of Miami! We sat in parking lots waiting for it to find a satellite.
#4. Forget IQ routes – by the end of our 10 days of using it, we were convinced that the 140S algorithm was set up to find the most circuitous, irrational route to get from point A to B. Anything we plugged in would take estimates “20 minutes”. And then we would be going down unlit, residential roads.
#5. At least on one occasion in Orlando, *I* knew a better way to get to where we were going compared to what 140S had found us. I had only been in Orlando once before and that was 4 years ago!
#6. For us, the advance lane guidance was a novel but redundant feature. We’d rather take better GPS functionality over some fancy graphics any day.
1 Star Do NOT Update Without Activation Code!
Shortly after receiving this GPS, we plugged it into the computer to set up the HOME feature and to make sure we had the most up to date map. The program suggested that we update the map, and we did. After the update, we were prompted for an activation code which was supposed to be included in the box. Well guess what? No activation code came with our product. So we deleted the map from the GPS, only to find out that the update had overwritten the old map and we now had NO MAP on the GPS. We found another map we could download for free, although again it was going to require an activation code. We couldn’t even get that far, though, because the map was slightly larger than the entire internal memory for our device. So my husband emailed TomTom about our issue (could never get through on the phone), and their response was that there is currently NO MAP for this device. We were instructed to send it in to them so that they could then send us a replacement. I don’t know why we would ever want to keep the device, considering we will never be able to get updated maps.
5 Stars Makes Navigation Easy
I 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.
Buy/More Info
