Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Received an XL335TM as a gift yesterday and spent over 7 hours today trying to get it to work properly. Out of the box and into the car and it turned up nicely. I entered my home data sitting in the driveway and decided to give it a test drive. I picked the post office from the POI list and let it select a route. The first thing I noticed was the voice just told me to "turn left in 100 yards", no announcing of street names. I made sure I had a computer generated voice selected since the recorded voices don't give street names. I did, but it didn't work. Second thing I noticed was that the traffic function was searching for signal and couldn't find one. When I got to the post office (almost) it announced I had reached my destination. Not quite. I was still a good quarter of a mile away. At the post office, I entered Home as my new destination and followed the directions back. When I got within about four hundred yards of home, with still a right hand turn to make, it announced I had reached my destination. Sitting in my driveway I could see the logo of a house around the corner and down the block. It told me the house number where I sat was 180 instead of 130, which was shown as being around the corner. Bummer, zero for two on finding actual locations. I made my first of about 8 calls to tech support. On the positive side, my wait for an agent was always short with a couple of minutes being the longest wait. All the agents were very polite and must have been located in the US based on their clear use of the English language. That was a plus. They all tried to be very helpful and seemed to understand how to proceed in solving the problems. I then proceeded to download the latest version of the application and the latest map for North America to fix the location and the traffic reception problems. That process took several hours and it didn't make a difference. It still thought my house was around the block and there still was no traffic data reception. Then we played games with downloading, installing, uninstalling various voices. Trying to install voices on the GPS kept resulting in error messages. I was then instructed to format the unit and reinstall everything. I followed the format instructions but Windows came back saying it was unsuccessful in performing the format. At that point, the GPS unit stopped communicating with TomTom Home and my PC no longer saw the unit on the USB port. I changed ports and that didn't matter either. I was offered an RMA code to send the unit back. I said not to bother. I was TAKING the unit back and getting a refund. Oh yes, the screen touch sensitivity is really strange. I found the adjacent letter often being recognized vs the one I pressed or at least intended to press. I found I needed to be very deliberate and slow in pressing a key to get it to enter properly. And then I ran the risk of the letter being entered multiple times. So just typing a street name correctly was a chore. The same was true of changing pages. Sometimes what I thought was one touch to change a page was interpreted as two or three touches resulting me getting to a totally different page than I had intended. This has been a real disappointing experience. I have an old TomTom (120 or 140), which doesn't speak street names or have traffic (but neither did the 355TM) and it has an old map which accurately knows where my house is. It works fine and I think I'll just stick with it and save my wife $170 on the gift she gave me.