Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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288 of 299 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Good but Flawed, July 11, 2005
The TomTom Go700 is great! I own a Garmin c330 (also phenomenal product), but this one is equipped with excellent new features that keep it bleeding-edge car navigation.
First off, the Bluetooth connectivity makes this product a winner in itself. The phone calls are crystal-clear with my Ericsson T637. Callers also say they can hear me perfectly. The connectivity is awesome, plus with web access on your mobile, you can collect current weather and traffic data from TomTom. The voices are loud and clear, and the 3D navigation outperforms the Garmin.
Navigation-wise, the product is also awesome. Route planning is easy and intuitive. If you don't like a certain route, you can select alternate routes on-the-fly. You can select from a large number of route views (text only, map, both, etc.), and route demos can be sped up or slowed down (unlike c330).
Other awesome features include tips and tutorials for learning the intracacies of the product. You can also download new voices to the device (such as John Cleese) for added customizability. This is so much fun! The features go on and on....
All in all, this is a significant improvement over the Garmin c330. It adds all the functions I wished were available on the Garmin. This is so greatly customizable and easy-to-use. I consider it the Mac version of GPS car navigation.
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One week later...
After owning the product for a week, I decided to return it. I had a few issues with the unit powering up; I needed to reset it several times. I also found a few annoyances with looking up points of interest. Unlike the Garmin, you must first select a category before searching for a POI. This made it impossible to search for Dry Cleaners, Banks, and many other very necessary locations!
Map data is also a bit outdated. Entering my office address didn't work on the unit. It only registered a certain range of "house" numbers, with mine not being one of them. TomTom also uses TeleAtlas maps, which (in my opinion) are not as nice as Garmin's NAVTEQ ones. They both work, but I find usability easier and more efficient on the Garmin.
Also, reading cell phone text messages via the unit was practically useless. Messages were encoded with a string of strange text before the actual body of the message.
Many fun features (such as Traffic & new POI's) are not yet available in the US, either. This product is a little bit of everything rolled into one. It's a really cool unit, with tons of features, but I think it's a bit flawed. I hope TomTom continues to support many of the features it advertses (Weather, Traffic, Voices, etc.).
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353 of 372 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
No support and two major design problems, August 11, 2005
I used this product for about two weeks and decided to return it for three reasons.
First, whenever you are on the freeway and it tells you where to get off the freeway, it only gives you the exit number and not the name of the street. While that might be fine back east, here in California, the exits are marked primarily with street names, not exit numbers. In fact, several of the exit numbers that it has recommended were wrong (because the exit numbers had changed).
Second, when the system tells you to get onto a freeway (or change freeways), it almost never tells you which direction you are going to go (i.e., north or south on the I-5), making it difficult to figure out which lane to choose? Sure, you can figure it out by carefully studying the map while you barrel down the highway, but I'd rather just have it tell me which direction and then read the signs on the highway to select the correct lane...
Third, there is absolutely no support for this product. You cannot reach them by telephone, and although I sent a message through their website more than two weeks ago asking if there's a way to fix these two issues, there has been no response at all.
Ultimately, I replaced this with a Garmin product, which does not have any of these issues.
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60 of 61 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent interface, mediocre performace, buy the 300 instead, December 8, 2005
After weeks of research, reading reviews, and comparison shopping between the Lowrane IWay 500c, the Garmin StreetPilot 2270, and the Tomtom go 700, I finally decided to plunk down $800 for the Tomtom Go 700. Following a week of use including a roundtrip from Sacramento to LA, here are some of my findings.
Pros:
Start-up time is quick. It typically only took 10-15 seconds to start up and an additional 10 seconds to accurately find my position. I imagine the 12 receivers help to find your position fairly accurately and quickly should a couple satellite signals be too weak or not within line of sight of the unit.
The user interface is fantastic. The layout of icons and and GUI is very intuitive. It's easy to save destinations, POIs, adjust your preferences etc.
The audio cues are great too. Audio output from the speaker is amazingly clear, and the language selections are extremely comprehensive.
The predictive text feature is also very accurate although sometimes you may get two results. For example, if you type in Walnut Street, you might get two options N. Walnut and S. Walnut, traditional maps or even addresses of businesses often times do not make this distinction (which isn't necessarily their fault) When I looked at the street signs at the intersection, the sign simply said "Walnut Street."
The 3D map is helpful for gauging future turns and provides a better perspective than your typical 2D or bird's eye view of the map.
If you are able to pair your cell phone using the integrated Bluetooth feature on the Tomtom go, you'll find that the hands free audio quality is impressive as well.
Another big benefit is that the Tomtom Go 700 is truly portable. Since there is a battery in the unit you can take it with you on walks while on vacation through San Francisco, NYC, etc. The Garmin StreetPilot 2270 or the Lowrance Iway 500c do not have this feature.
Cons:
I found the maps to be slightly outdated. It's my understanding that the maps used by Magellan and Garmin are more recent and tend to be more accurate.
The Tomtom 700 does not have WAAS (Wide Area Augmentation System), which provides a more accurate position within 3 meters. Sometimes after starting the Tomtom 700 on the freeway,it would tell me that I was on a suface street close-by and parallel to the freeway. The Garmin StreetPilot 2270 does have WAAS.
I live in California and most of our exits are labeled with street names, not exit numbers. Unfortunately this is one of the major flaws with the Tomtom systems as often times they only provide an exit number and not a street name. There were times where it did offer both, but having the street exit names in the map database would be helpful to me.
As with many other GPS navigation systems, the Tomtom's screen tends to get washed out in direct sunlight. It's not unreadable, but direct sun will definitely hinder your ability to quicly glance at the display and read any helpful information or prompts.
The POI database is fairly comprehensive but there were exits along my trip to LA that did not list gas stations close by where I could visibly see gas stations present. Also it's fairly difficult to search for a particular store or restaurant since when you select the POI database it lists POIs in increasing distance based on your present geographic location or city center. Not the easiest way of finding what you want when you know where you want to go.
The assisted satellite navigation (ASN) feature is pretty much useless as on the satellite signal, the GPS system display's you going in all sorts of directiosn until you're out of the tunnel.
Conclusion:
I found the Tomtom 700 to be a competent automobile GPS system, however if you're considering buying it, I'd select the Tomtom Go 300 instead as the only feature it's missing is the hard drive and ability to control via the wireless remote which is an option with the 700 model. With the 300 you still get the entire map database of the US compressed into a SD card, where as with the Tomtom 700 it takes a long time to back up the map database to your personal computer and it takes a vast amount of hard drive space (3.5GB). The 300 also has a slightly slower processor but I expect performance to be fairly comprable to the 700 model.
I for one will probably exchange my 700 for a 300 model or wait and hope that Garmin comes out with a battery powered model with an integrated speaker to suceed the Streetpilot 2270 in a few months.
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