TomTom presents the new ONE and XL

Today the TomTom Event 2008 is taking place in Amsterdam. Under the motto 'Shaping the future of navigation', the company is bringing the press and their business relations up to date with the latest developments in the personal navigational arena. TomTom also used this opportunity to announce two brand new devices: the renewed TomTom ONE and TomTom XL.

Entry-level

Last year this event took place in Cannes, France, and TomTom unveiled the GO 520, 720 and of course also Map Share. This year we didn't need to travel that far since the meeting was a lot closer to home: Amsterdam, and this time no new GO's, but some new entry-level models.

With the introduction of the 2008 version of the ONE (with 3.5 inch touch screen) and the TomTom XL (4.3 inch) TomTom is clearly aiming for consumers who are not looking for all sorts of complicated features. Both devices are very basic and lack more advanced features like Bluetooth support, handsfree phoning and text-to-speech. Clearly no-nonsense navigational devices.

Mount

Still, the ONE and XL do feature some interesting new developments, the new car mount being the most obvious one. This so-called 'EasyPort' mount is integrated into the device and is foldable when the device is not being used. This means mount and device are one whole which easily slips into your jacket pocket. We've not been able to test how well this works though. We did have the chance to hold a sample of these new devices in our hands and we are very pleased with the build quality: both devices feel very solid and we have good faith they'll be practical to use.

The new TomTom PND's are shipped with NavCore 7 navigational software, to which a few features have been added. The day/night mode can now switch automatically based on time tables and Map Share has been updated with the NavCore 8 features, like eg. the changing/adding of the maximum speed on a certain road. Also new is the option of having destinations corrected whilst typing them. This is especially handy when special characters are used in the street and city names, as is sometimes the case in foreign countries.

Versions

The ONE and XL will be shipped with a regional map, a Western European map or a map of the entire European continent pre-installed into the internal Flash memory. There will also be versions available with an RDS/TMC antenna standard in the box. Which versions will be available in which countries is still not clear yet though.

The introductory price for the new ONE with European map material has been set at € 199. The 4.3 inch XL with European maps will sell for € 279. These new systems should be available right about now via the usual channels.