For more fun Lost products see our page at http://lost.tvfantees.com with some of our favorite designs by other CafePress shopkeepers.

I decided to get a new GPS for our upcoming trip to the Niagara Falls. For several weeks I looked at lots of different brands and models. I read dozens of reviews and tried out all the current models at Best Buy. Garmin is the market leader here, but I really didn’t like the way it operated. I kept coming back to the handy interface of TomTom that I’m used to.

So TomTom it was. I decided to upgrade to the new TomTom GO 730 for all its extra features. It has a wider 4.3-inch screen, speech recognition, lane guidance, FM transmitter and spoken street names. Sounds good, he? Well, we used the 730 for two weeks and were extremely disappointed with the device. I returned it to Amazon for a full refund.

Here’s what I didn’t like about the TomTom Go 730:

• The speech recognition, or Voice Address Input, is a neat idea, but implemented very poorly. You still have to touch the screen several times during the process before it starts navigating. The whole point of speech recognition should be so that you don’t have to lean forward while you’re driving to touch the screen. The worst part with our device though, was that this function only worked once. After the first day it broke down and never recognized any input anymore.
   
• The battery life of our new TomTom 730 was extremely bad. It needed to be constantly plugged into the car charger and directly after taking it out it would already complain about low battery. This is also the case with our old TomTom One (not when it was brand new though!), but at least you have some time to plug it in when the battery is red. On our 730 when the battery went red it shut down instantly after the first warning! There was no time to plug it in.
   
• At some time the spoken instructions were inexplicably off. We were driving around Chicago one day and did not hear any instructions even though the volume was on high. Next time we turned it on the spoken instructions were back.
   
• The FM transmitter is a cool concept, but here in Chicago there were too many radio stations that kept interfering and this made it hard to hear the instructions. This may work fine outside a large metropolitan area, but when you update the TomTom (any TomTom with FM transmitter technology) through your computer the new software will remove this feature! There’s a new law in the UK that prevents TomTom’s having an FM transmitter and the company decided to get rid of it on all their devices globally. That is outrageous. A GPS device knows exactly where it is, so it must not be difficult for the software to just switch off the FM transmitter if the TomTom is in the United Kingdom and leave it working in other countries. How lame is that?
   
• The spoken street names are pretty cool, but sometimes very hard to understand. It speaks much too fast and leaves out random syllables. For instance “Michigan Avenue” sounded like “chigan vnue”. Also some regular spoken words were worse than our old TomTom. On our TomTom One it would clearly say “Toll Charge”, but on the new 730 it sounded like “Tll Chrg”.
   
• I had been impressed by nice screenshots of the lane assist that I had seen in advertisements and on the TomTom website. Like this one:
   That looks so cool! This new Advanced Lane Guidance feature is supposed to provide you with realistic representations of complex highway junctions. The truth is that there are very little of these nice pictures available. On our 1200-mile roadtrip from Chicago to Niagara Falls we only got to see one of these nice Advanced Lane Guidance pictures, and it wasn’t even at a particularly difficult highway junction. There were a lot more complicated junctions on our route through 7 states, but we never saw any more of these nice pictures.
   
• On my old TomTom One we always have the compass on in the bottom-left of the screen. The small circle is about a centimeter in diameter and tells you the direction you’re driving. The new TomTom Go 730 still has the compass feature, but it is tiny! It is less than half the size of the old compass and the arrow inside is very hard to see. Add to that that the screen is not bright enough (see next bullet) and the compass is completely useless. I don’t have bad eyes but I found myself constantly squinting at the screen trying to see what direction we were going.
   
• The thing I hatest most about the 730 was its screen. The brightness is much too low! I had a very hard time seeing the picture if the sun was shining. The screen of the 730 is a lot less bright than that of my old TomTom. With my old TomTom One the person in the passenger seat can easily read the screen, even on a sunny day, but on the 730 this is impossible. The screen was hard to see and couldn’t be seen at all from an angle.

I’m glad I could still return this piece of junk and I already got my money back thanks to Amazon’s excellent customer service. There are a lot of refurbished 730’s on sites like Amazon and Newegg, which should have a been a clue; lots of people must be returning them.

I did learn something valuable though. I tried the generic car charger I bought at Wal-Mart with the new 730 and it too was making a high-pitched noise. So it turns out that it wasn’t our old TomTom One that was having a problem … but the new car charger was faulty! What about that?!

I ordered an official TomTom car charger from Amazon and we are now back to using our old TomTom and we are loving it. If this one ever breaks down for good we’ll just get a new One. They are much cheaper than the higher-end models, but who needs all those new functions anyway? As long as it brings me to where I need to go I’m happy.

We looked for frying pans with baskets at all our local shops (Kohl’s, Bed Bath & Beyond, Sears, Walmart, Target, etc) but they only sell electric fryers. So I had a look online. Plenty of shops sell minuscule pots of 4 quarts or less. I figured we need at least 7 quarts, but even bigger would be better (I guess our beloved old one was 9 or 10). I found one restaurant specialty shop that sold baskets and fryers separately at reasonable prices, but shipping was crazy (about the same price as the implements themselves). Then I found out that Farberware makes a 7Q fryer with a basket, and that I could purchase it from Target.com with reasonable shipping costs. Yay! I placed my order.

The UPS man dropped off the replacement yesterday. We’re having fries tonight! I thought. Inside the box was a Farberware pot with fry basket, placed loosely among bags of air. A 4Q pot. Aargh!

I called Target this time, and unbelievably I was advised to return the pot and take my refund. The agent was kind of vague, saying she was “afraid the same thing would happen again” if I requested another replacement. Well, I really want that mythical 7Q pan so I went through the replacement procedure online via Target.com a second time.

To my extreme disappointment, I received this email from Target.com today.

I’m really sorry your replacement order #(number removed) didn’t work out either. I guess there’s a bigger problem with this item than we thought.

Because of the trouble, we won’t be able to send another replacement. Please return the incorrect item at our expense and we’d be happy to issue a full refund.

What is this, they make two strikes and I’m out?! I can’t believe the solution from Target.com is to not send me what I’ve ordered. The product is even still listed on the website for sale!

Yep, really.

I give it 4-and-a-half stars!

We got a call on Monday evening from someone at CafePress asking us if they could share our contact details with a magazine as they wanted to feature one of our products. An hour later I was speaking to someone at People magazine. We’re thrilled that a big magazine like People featured one of our designs.

You can click the scan of the article above for a larger version. And you can find our dog bowls at cafepress.com/leftique/5649725 with 25 breeds to choose from.

We decided to go to our nearest Kohl’s, which had already opened at 4:00 (!) but we arrived at around 6:30. The parking lot was almost full but there were still some places. When we entered the store there were two HUGE lines at the register that went around the entire perimeter of the store. People were dragging huge plastic bags full of stuff behind them as the lines crept forward. There were still a lot of really great sales available. Kohl’s had hundreds of products on the ‘early bird’ sale, which ran until noon. We picked out some things and got in the long line. It went pretty quickly and only took about 30 minutes until we reached the cashier. In front of us was a party of three women who had only one small bag between them when we got in line, but two of them kept running away to get more stuff and by the end they were dragging several huge bags full of stuff behind them.

When we left Kohl’s the parking lot was completely packed and we made someone very happy with our Kohl’s shopping bag and parking space. We got out at about 8:00 and then headed to Hawthorn Mall in Vernon Hills. It wasn’t so crowded there. We figured most people were still in the big box stores like Wal Mart, Target and Best Buy. Many of the stores in the mall didn’t even have a sale. Some did though. The Disney Store, for instance, had 20% off everything until 10:00.

After the mall our final stop was Target. It was around 10:30am at this time and it was still very crowded (they had opened at 6:00). A lot of the doorbuster display cases were empty. Especially the cheap DVD’s and Blu-Rays were wiped out.

This was my first Black Friday and it was a lot of fun to see all the frantic shoppers. We got some very good deals!

When you have this bookmarklet in your favorites, you can add any item from any website to your Amazon wish list! I tried it with a couple of my favorite online shops and it works like a charm.

The Amazon Universal Wish List popup on Scubadorable

When you see a product – on any website! – that you want to add to your Amazon Wish List, click on the bookmarklet to bring up the Wish List pop-up. When I did this on Birdorable, the product name and correct photo default in, and I was able to enter the price and a personal note. Then I clicked on Add to Wish List and – woo hoo! – there it is.

My Wish List now showing Scubadorable jacket

We got our first Welpie on Monday and today I picked up another.

Our Welpies

If you collect three Welpies, you can turn in the ends of their tails for a Mega Welpie or a Welpie Cap. According to Welpie.nl, there are 700,000 Mega Welpies and 200,000 Welpie caps. Today our local AH appeared to be out of caps and nearly out of Mega Welpies.

Two years ago the Wuppie campaign was a huge success, with Dutch soccer fans coveting them so much that they sold for up to four times their original price on eBay and some were even stolen from cars. There is another article about Wuppie-mania here. I wonder if the Welpie campaign will be as successful?

Here’s the television ad:

Of course, we also have some cool Obama and Hillary designs in our Leftique store on Cafepress. One of our Dogs for Obama t-shirts was recently featured on the Cafepress Blog.