Deal of the Day - 8/29/08 - #2 with GPS recommendation

Hello Again,

On my brilliant wife's recommendation, I have switched fonts to... the default font in Blogger. I personally like Times, but she said it was stiff. Being I am young and hip, I switched.

Post two, before the long weekend. I should have posted this earlier, as it might be useful for this weekend. Buy.com is selling refurbished TomTom One 3rd edition GPS units for 99.49 after rebate, with free shipping. You can find them here.

There are a couple of reviews, here and here.

People at Amazon liked the units, you can see that here.

I think this is a fine unit, and one of my friends has one and likes it. I bought the Garmin Nuvi 360 myself, and I would buy it again. You can find it here. I bought the 360 because of these features

1. It has Text-to-speech. In other words it tells you what streets to turn on. Instead of saying turn left in 500 feet, it says turn left on Broadway. This is a huge deal as it allows you to easily drive with the GPS in a location that you do not have to look at it. You can keep you head up and your eyes on the road. For me this is the must have feature.
   
2. It uses Navteq maps, which are better than the Tele Atlas maps that TomTom uses. This is only true for North America, but that is where I live and where I drive. If you plan on going to Eurpoe with your GPS, you might want to check further into this.
3. It can be used with traffic subscriptions. I would need to buy an antenna and subscribe to the Garmin service, but if I move to a larger city, or Madison gets this service I liked the fact that I could upgrade the 360 to make use of these features.
   
4. It has Bluetooth. I can use my phone with the GPS as a hands free device and make calls to places in the phone. This was not a make or break deal, but it was only $25 more dollars so I went for it.

You can see a detailed breakdown of the different Garmin units here. Overall TomTom units are fine units, and their maps updates are cheaper, but I would recommend Garmin if you want to spend double the money. If you are looking for a basic unit and are unsure how much you will use it, this TomTom One is definitely the way to go.

--Update--

I have a third alternative, right in between the two units I mentioned above, the Nuvi 250w. Dell is selling it brand spanking new for $149. You can find it here. I would recommend this one above the TomTom if you have the $50. It is new, it has a bigger screen which is a big deal if you do not have the text to speech, and it uses the Navteq maps. All of those things are better than the TomTom. You can find Amazon reviews here.

Later,

John