Review on TomTom START 50M: Your Ultimate 5-Inch GPS Navigator with Lifetime Maps by Mark Gilbert

I bought this because I have an old TomTom that seems to be very slow to start and a bit decrepit. I thought it would be less learning if I buy the same brand. I was right about the learning curve. But this thing has the same problems as the old TomTom device, with the added disadvantage that it's much slower to recalculate when someone is forced to take a different route - much slower. Speech synthesizer often stutters and mispronounces street names in PA and NJ. and track numbers. That never happened with the old TomTom, it just confused me at times. If you buy this item, don't hesitate. Try it out and return it before the 30-day return period is over. My window closed yesterday - lesson learned. The final straw for me was that I got lost in South Jersey last night when neither I nor my wife could tell if the GPS was telling us to use Rt 30 or Rt 38 I printed out before we left, we did one another tour of New Jersey in the dark. I'm really tired of printing routes just in case. I would like to have a GPS where I could upload it with directions that I can read clearly in advance, like Google or Yahoo Maps. I'd also like a GPS with a "Home James" button that changes route with a single touch. I turned it off last night on the way home because it obviously takes us to Philadelphia over a more distant bridge. I was lucky and found my way home with distant memories of streets and cities. I would never use it to go where I've never been. Luckily, New Jersey is a pretty friendly place that you can always ask for directions if you don't have distant memories to fall back on. It's surprising that TomTom has made very few real improvements in 10 years. Big screens aren't really an improvement, they just block most of the windshield when you need to take control and find your own way home. Timmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm