SatNav Update

In my first post I mentioned that I'd bought a TomTom ONE. I have just sold that on eBay (for £60 less than I paid for it, but hey) and replaced it with a TomTom GO 700. Not because the ONE wasn't good, because it was excellent, but because I need the European maps feature. I'm taking two Euro trips in the next three weeks, and I don't much fancy starting my holidays by getting lost and getting in to arguments.

TomTom make European maps available for other models like the ONE, in two different forms. Firstly, as a set of individual maps available on CD or via the web. These maps are loaded a country at a time, although I believe you can use the "Plus" maps that give you the "Major Roads of Europe" for other countries to navigate cross-continent. The second form is on an SD card that TomTom supply, which contains full maps for the whole of Europe and allows door-to-door planning. That, however, is £180 and added to the £250 I'd already spent on the TT1 was more than I could get a GO 700 for!

There are, I'm sure, plenty of ways to get European mapping working far more cheaply but I have enough complications in life that anything I can smooth over with a little extra cash is almost certainly worth it.

The GO 700 is certainly cool, I got it to map a route from my driveway to Verona airport in Italy. It took about 3 or 4 minutes and then out it popped. It's got a 2.5Gb hard disk rather than an SD card, and it sounds a lot like my MP3 player. It's slower than the ONE if it has to load information from the HD but I will look in to optimising that. The majority of the time it will be used in the UK so perhaps European stuff can be set aside or something.