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If you have been under a rock, you don’t know that as of yesterday my family and I live in Seattle Washington. More specifically, we live in Redmond Washington at the moment.

Get Where You Need to Go
We landed at about 7 PM local time last night and quickly collected our baggage and picked up our rental car. Being an ultra techno geek, I had already pre-programmed the address to the corporate housing into the TomTom One XL and stored it in my camera bag. I popped it out, plugged it into the cigarette lighter and stuck the suction cup on the windshield.

Once we had left the garage, I pressed the screen, selected navigate to, and pushed "home" on the touch screen. It took it about 5 seconds and my route was planned and a British woman was telling me where to go. We drove all twenty miles without incident and landed exactly where we needed to be to collect the key. After dropping off an extremely travel weary cat, we needed to get to a store quickly to get some cat supplies and groceries.

Enter Smartphone
If you have a phone running Windows Mobile, I hope you are using Live Search. I had installed previously and absolutely love it. I set the local city to Redmond Washington and searched Fred Meyer. I entered the address on the TomTom and less than 5 miles away, again we drove straight to it.

This morning it took us to Starbucks and tonight we added a trip to the Apple Store, one more trip to Fred Meyer and home again. If you stop to think about how far we have come, it’s truly amazing. We come to a city as large as Seattle. I have never been here in my life. I can drive straight where I want to go every time and I never get lost. It’s like I know the area already. Amazing times, don’t you think?

I was pretty frustrated when I started playing with my new TomTom One XL and found out that TomTom doesn’t like Verizon. They state no support. With a Bluetooth enabled smartphone with high speed data services, and a TomTom One XL that supports them, I was near returning it to the store.

I am pleased to say that I avoided that with a little research and some patience.

After some fiddling, and some searching, I found settings that do work for Windows Mobile on Verizon with tethered Internet support.

1. Phone selection – other
2. Carrier selection – other
3. Access point – vzw3g
4. username – (phone number)@vzw3g.com
5. password – vzw
6. number to dial – #777
7. No scripts

The setup is pretty painless, first pair your devices, then when it asks you to set up your wireless connection, wait forever while it tries, then when it fails, select the US, select other for the Phone Model and Carrier, then use the connection settings above.

I tested it with the weather and software downloading features and it worked like a charm.