After having my GPS stolen a few months ago, I finally bit the bullet and decided to go with the TomTom 920T.

Love:

• Beautiful industrial design. The gray plasti-rubber case has a delightful silky texture, is comfortable to hold in the hand, has enough heft to feel “serious,” yet not uncomfortably heavy.
• Awesome remote navigation
• Pretty good TTS and voice recognition (though it’s insisting on calling San Francisco “San Frahn This Kah” (spanish inflection?)
• Very tasty 3D view
• Lots of user generated features: A user can update POIs, make map corrections, report traffic cameras, and possibly other stuff I haven’t discovered yet. You can download these corrections as well, with a polite prompt to choose all changes or just those verified by TomTom. Coolbeans.
• On a similar note, the device can track driving times in aggregate and upload them to TomTom, allowing refined driving time estimates as the info flows in. Implementation poor though, see below.
• FM Transmitter, which is 6 degrees past awesome. In theory it will send tunes from the SD or built-in memory. It does NOT, however send voice calls, so see below.
• iPod integration: again, totally rocking in theory, but see below.
• Traffic. Sweet.
• Mac software. Just by having it at all, this is a cool thing, but… see below.
• [Update] I forgot to mention that I also love the teeny dorky mount. I was prepared to hate it after having a decently engineered gooseneck on my previous unit, sure that it would be annoying to use and adjust. In fact it works very well and the suction cup works well. It does put the unit out of easy reach, but because the remote works so well, that’s a non issue.

Hate:

• TomTom Home, the desktop software, is pretty bad. The interaction design is a thoughtlessly organized mashup of commercial offerings and device management. File management (music and photos, though why someone would want photos mystifies me) is awful, providing a perfect munge of anti-patterns in labeling, calls-to-action, list selection, and overall placement. The mental model is… psychotic, bordering on socio-pathic.
• On the same lines, I am really yucked out by the fact that during my first driving time log transfer, I have been stuck in a spinning marble of death mode for about 10 minutes. The modal and uncancelable dialog box claims to be uploading. The entire interface is dead to the touch (I can’t even bring it into focus it’s so zoned out right now.) Very poor. Perhaps a glitch, but first impressions count, and it prompted this post.
• FM Transmitter/Bluetooth stuff: While music and driving directions are sent to the stereo via FM transmitter, phone conversations are not. Additionally, the iPod integration requires a special dock connector to get through the transmitter, which is stupid since it’s already talking to the device via bluetooth. THis stupidity is possibly partly due to the BT implementation on the iPhone, and who knows what else, but it’s very disappointing. I’ve got my magic special connector on order, but that won’t help the lack of phone-to-stereo integration I hoped for.
• No printed manual. I’m generally all for no printed manuals, but this is a pretty complex little beastie, and there are some basic features that are simply undocumented in the getting started materials that should have been accounted for.

(Note: I did a followup review for this device.)