Sunday, November 1, 2009

Lowest Price TomTom GO 720 4.3-Inch Widescreen Bluetooth Portable GPS Navigator


First of all, I have to say this is an excellent unit. Among the ones I tried, (Magellan 3225, nuvi 200, tomtom one, mio c230) this is the one I really hate to let go.
I'm returning it because of some reasons. I'm not going to go through what it has, you can read them on other reviews or on the tomtom website but I'm going to explain what you are not getting.
The first reason is the price. I started with paying $150 on a tomtom one then slowly increased the price and ended up with Go 720.
I bought this from Sams's club for $329.00 (now $349.00). For that much money I would expect to get a case and maybe an AC charger. You do get a cradle but that requires you to turn on your computer everytime you want to charge the unit at home. I wish they threw a little wall charger which has a usb outlet so I could hook up the cradle and wouldn't have to turn on my computer. You can buy generic one from Ebay for probably 10 bucks but why should I pay extra money for the case and the charger if I'm already paying so much money. It's not a big deal but it would be convenient.
It shows the POIs around you while you are driving, but they are not interactive icons (like Magellan has) so you can't see the info or just chose to go there by clicking on it. You should be able to click on them and have option to call or drive there, just like in Magellan units.
The POI category is way too much (broken into so many categories) but at the same time they are kind of useles, like there is no sub category for food. Say you want to find Chinese food around, you have to know the name or guess from the names you find.
The bluetooth is not working properly. It connected to my Blackberry 8100 with ease but couldn't get data connection. It worked when I called people, sound quality is superior, they did not even know I was talking to GO 720, but then I wasn't able to establish a connection when someone called, we just couldn't hear each other.
You have many options for the voice instructions, you can download so many voices, even funny ones like dart wader, homer simpson, etc.. but only few tomtom made "computer voices" can read the street names. If you want to use special voices or human voices, you have to sacrifice the text-to-speech function. I wish I had a choice to use human voice for normal instructions and second voice for reading street names aloud.
The good thing is with a little trick you can turn the unit to Go 920. which gives you an extra menu to use voice commands. So instead of entering the address, you say them. However, you have to go 3 menus (Navigate To>Address>Spoken Dialog) in order to give voice commands. So if I'm going to go thru all that, I might as well enter the address manually. Anyway, that's an additional trick for the unit so it's irrelevant to this review.
The windshield mount works perfect. Few drop of water and place it firm, then you will have hard time removing it. (I did). Unfortunately it doesn't charge the unit. So if you are connecting the unit to the cable of your car charger, you have to unplug the cable every time you take it with you (believe me you will if you don't want it get stolen). It's just inconvenient. Tottom could come up with a design, maybe an additional hook up charger that you clip on to the stem of windshield mount tightly and attached the cable on to it.
So the reasons I'm returning is because: lack of case, a wall charger, windshield mount, the need-work bluetooth, non-interactive POIs and the price, in my opinion it's really not worth to pay that much, I would, however, keep it for $250.00. Maybe they will add those features with firmware update, fix the bluetooth, and throw a case (that should be a must, I mean come on..) then it'll be a killer, and I would buy one.
For those who think Navteq is better than Tele Atlas; in my opinion that's not true. I found Tele Atlas better than Navteq but again, that's argumental. Get more detail about TomTom GO 720 4.3-Inch Widescreen Bluetooth Portable GPS Navigator.

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