TomTom VIA 1605M GPS Navigator with Lifetime Maps (Discontinued by Manufacturer)

This is our third Tom Tom. We love all the new features. The big screen is easy to see. There is a clear voice so you don't have to watch the screen. I can't say enough good things about this item. I highly recommend it for everyone. Even if you don't travel away from home it makes going places so easy. It tells you how many miles to your destination, so you can plan you time. We are VERY pleased. Delivery of this item was very speedy. Thanks.

Overall pretty good (at least so far). I got a TomTom VIA 1605M to replace my 18 month old Magellan 5220-LM that just died. The 6" screen is noticeably larger than the 5" screen on the Magellan. Contrary to some other reviewers I have not found the touchscreen particularly hard to press, but the menu structure is much less convenient than on the Magellan. The directions seem pretty good (although I haven't done a lot with it yet)As others have noted, it takes a long time to download and install at least the initial updates for the maps and software. Hopefully future updates will be quicker. One small problem with downloading the initial updates was that I had the GPS itself telling me that it was Done and OK to Disconnect -- at the same time that the TomTom MyDrive website was warning me NOT to disconnect the GPS.One thing I miss having gone from the Magellan to the TomTom is the alert for each turn. On the Magellan it gives a simple chime note just as you get to the turn which is handy when there are multiple places you COULD turn. The TomTom gives very similar voice directions but no clear and obvious signal that means Turn HERE. One complaint about the voice directions on the TomTom is that it almost always gives a "In Two Hundred Fifty Feet" [do this] but that 250' advance notice is almost always given at about 75-100 feet instead of at 250 feet before the turn.The map color choices on the TomTom are nice, especially the night colors. The voice choices are a good idea but not very well implemented in that only the default voice speaks the street names. These will be better if TomTom makes some more fully functional voices available instead of playing with jokes. I also like the TomTom route summary that gives you a chance to see if the GPS has decided to do something stupid (ALL these units occasionally pick bad routes, but with the TomTom you can see the route before you start driving).Another thing I miss on the TomTom is the OneTouch button on my old Magellan GPS which gave direct access to something similar to the TomTom's "favorites" but in a way that was much easier to use.Added 4/10/2014:I had to take the rating down (from 4 to 3 stars) after using this thing for a week. It does OK most of the time if you know the address of your destination but the POIs are completely worthless. Like the maps the POIs are at least two years out of date, the are so bad that they are worse than useless. Even if the TomTom does find the place you want it will be buried among other similar places and the list doesn't give the address, but only the distance, so you can't tell which places it thinks it found. Tell it to find Walmart and you get a list of a dozen walmarts, but no way to tell which of the three different walmarts 7-8 miles away is the one you want. Today I tried to get it to take me to the Post Office. First I used the search by name looking for Post Office, and it ignored all the nearby Post Offices and the closest one it found was over 16 miles away (there are at least four closer ones). Then I did the category search and it tried to show me hundreds of places it thought were post offices - apparently it includes every place that the postal service ever had a mailbox in the list (99% of those have been removed years ago) - and of course without addresses you can't even try to guess which entry is where to try to find the real ones.Added 5/30/2014:I just took the rating down to 1 star -- because Amazon won't let me give it ZERO stars (a rating of Minus Two or Minus Three would be more accurate!)Barely two months after purchase, this Tom Tom 1605M has become totally unusable -- I went to the Tom Tom support website, first of all Tom Tom does not even admit that the VIA 1605M exists. They do have a set of troubleshooting questions for "My device loses or finds no GPS Signal" BUT that actually only covers whether or not the device eventually find a GPS signal when it first starts up -- it has nothing about one that constantly loses the signal -- and according to their system my Tom Tom must be working perfectly because it does find a signal within a few minutes when it starts up -- they don't care that it loses that signal a minute later, then finds a signal, then loses the signal, etc, etc, etc. The screen has their grey overlay (GPS Signal Lost) more than it is clear.When it has a signal, it gets a lock on anywhere from six to nine satellites with a signal strength that it rates between 75% and 88% (whatever those are supposed to mean), but it never keeps the signal for more than a minute or two at most.The Tom Tom is mounted on the windshield of my van, with a clear view to at least 180 degrees of open sky -- the other GPS attached to my ham radio mounted on top of the dash has the same view and it never lost signal during any of my travels over the last two days (see http://aprs.fi and search for n4aof-9)And each time it loses the signal, the screen freezes, then when it reacquires the first few satellites the location jumps somewhere, but often jumps to a wrong location (the wrong way on a highway, or onto another nearby road) causing the unit to recalculate the route and announce some ridiculous voice directions trying to get me back to the road that I actually already am on.I've got a completely dead Magellan GPS that would do me more good than this piece of crap - it won't tell me where I am or give directions but at least it wouldn't be shouting WRONG directions at me every minute or two.I have used the Contact Us junk on the Tom Tom website, so now we will see IF they bother getting back to me about this junk or if I have to go to Square Trade.

Bought this while on a road trip through southern US. It was definitely worth it! All the reviews and opinions claimed that this was a slow unit compared to the Garmins. I can't comment on those, this is my first ever owned GPS unit and it is great. It has lifetime maps and covers all of North America, which is important if you live in Canada. It is easy to plan a route, and it has a nice feature to avoid detours. Once you become familiar with using it, it is very convenient to have.There are definitely times when it does not understand the best route, or just gets lost. You can use common sense to ignore these scenarios. We were driving North on the Interstate near Virginia, and there is a new Express lane there. It is 3 lanes and it is only open North bound in the AM and it is open South bound in the PM. The GPS wanted us to takes this express lane when we couldn't, we were driving North bound in the PM. It was trying to re-direct us onto the express lanes and we didn't know how to correct this.It should also be noted that the software to load maps onto the GPS is a bit confusing. There is not enough space on the GPS memory to load all the North America maps. You will need an extra camera card to do this. You can load a smaller subset of the maps (Eastern US and Canada), but it took some time to figure out why this wasn't working.I would definitely recommend this to anyone looking to purchase new. 6' screen is worth it, and I got it on sale.

Works okay, but don't like the frames.

This Product does not work as well as the VIA1505 that I had previously purchased . Since it is inferior I do not recommend it to anyone

very good product

tres performent et facile a comprendre