The only problem I have encountered was entering a destination whilst inside a car park then driving off without enabling the 30 seconds or so for the unit to get a satallite reception fix. Found that it was unable to establish exactly where I was located and plot a suitable route. Best thing is to always allow it to get 100% fix before driving off. It will detect wherever you are, even on a pathway within a field (dirt track) which I had to drive through to get to a particular destination.
I would recommend buying a battery charger for the unit, which saves you the hassle of having trailing wires from your cigarette lighter.
Having never used the TomTom can't make a direct comparison. Although having read about customer service and satisfaction from a number of reviewers who have had to contact TomTom, lead me to buying the Garmin C310.
It's not the cheapest on the market but it's far from expensive either and it's better than the really cheap ones. It's a dedicated system which means there are no software conflicts or fiddly menu systems to get through. If you can dial out on a mobile phone, you can use this!
It has a Touch screen for ease of use, and apart from needing your greasy paw prints cleaned off every so often it couldn't be simpler to use. There's a few multiple choice settings you can play with, including a 2D or 3D view, level of map detail displayed, screen brightness, units of measurement (Imperial or metric), Time Zone, route sellection criteria (Faster Time/Shorter Distance) and language selection. The map can track your movement and gives you plenty of advance warning of every turn.
Out of the box it comes with the lithium battery fitted, a holder for the car which can be easily fixed to the windscreen (in my opinion) or the dash (although I do find the dash fixing difficult to get to stick), UK street-level map including all MAIN roads in the rest of Europe and a USB lead and PC drivers. The fixing mount also contains a power cord with a cigarette lighter connection.
Selecting a destination is easy, you can either use:
1) The FULL postcode (unlike a previous reviewer claims, although you do need to change the data mode to numbers instead of letters and then back again) and house number.
2) A street name and/or number
3) You can spell an entry, such as Plymouth Argyle (for a footy trip) for example.
It also has some hotels and most petrol stations on it. So, you simply enter a destination and press GO and that's it, you're off with clear visual and audio directions in plenty of time for any turns. If you deliberately go a different way or take a wrong turn it knows and simply recalculates a new route from your new position. You can also save favourite destinations and your Home address for quick route selection. Indoors it will turn off the sattelite tracking and even simulate any selected route for you to play with. To date it hasn't sent me down a one way road yet and has been dead easy to use and follow.
The BEST thing about this product is that it can be updated with software updates and especially POIs (Points of Interest) using the software freely available from the Garmin website. Using their software, POIloader you can obtain databases containing the positions of all speeding cameras from certain websites and download them to the unit which then gives you audio and visual warning of any that fall on your travelling route, including temporary and handheld camera locations!!
My main niggle, and it's a small one, is that the car power lead trails over the gearstick but I can live with that. Also it only comes with a quick start guide, which although useful and easy to follow doesn't fully tell you everything about the unit. You can get a full comprehensive manual from the Garmin website in pdf format though.
Apart from those two small niggles though, in every other way it's been a cracking buy and a boon on long journeys!! I'd HIGHLY recommend it to anyone looking for a good, relatively inexpensive Sat-Nav unit.
