GPS

Comment:

Despite some nice features, this model let's you down in very important, bad ways.<br /><br />PROS: very accurate at estimating arrival times by taking real time traffic info and history into account.<br /><br />High level CONS: <br /><br />Too chatty when you don't need it, not chatty enough when you DO need it. Randomly changes destination sometimes(!!!).<br /><br />Details:<br /><br />It can take a very long time to get a GPS signal, even though you use the unit in that area all the time and it even delivered you there. This can be a significant problem if you're in an unfamiliar location and you need to know which way to go before making a very wrong choice (think driving out of a rental car lot at an airport assuming it will find the GPS signal by the time out you get to the road but it doesn't and now you have to pick which highway to get on NOW -- the wrong choice could add 30 minutes to an hour to your trip in a congested area).<br /><br />The other biggest problem is even worse. In 1 out of every 15 trips or so it will randomly change the destination to something else, often where you started from. It does this without you touching the unit at all. My theory is that the really bad connector to the charger is what does it -- maybe bumps in the road causes little mini-shorts that scrambles its brains. But you'll suddenly be driving along and notice that you're headed back where you came. Absolutely evil.<br /><br />I have a lot of nits that annoy me. Entering addresses is totally foreign to the way Americans think. For instance, if you want N. Meridian Street, you have to start searching for North. Try searching for Meridian, and you get nothing - not even a choice between North and South. Similarly, it has a European way of announcing where to turn when exiting, often naming the cities rather than the street names. Americans are used to looking for 280 North, not Cupertino (let's see, is Sunnyvale towards Cupertino or towards San Francisco?)<br /><br />When you make a mistake naming a place or entering other info, you have to DELETE back. There's no way to move the cursor without losing everything you typed. This is a real annoyance when I turn a RECENT into a FAVORITE and have to wipe out the entire street address to add a name when I want to keep the address number (see below) as part of the name.<br /><br />The unit doesn't display your target address when you arrive, it just tells you that you're here. For example, if you're looking for a business in a complex, without seeing the street address, you may have as many as 4 different drives to choose from (two on each side of the street).<br /><br />Another nit, there isn't any kind of lock screen mode (that I know of) so every time you touch the unit you end up backing out of navigation to your destination. In California we can't legally mount GPS on our dash boards so we have to let it flop around in the console and you have to reposition it every now and then -- ooops, no longer going to your destination.<br /><br />The prompts for directions as you drive are too frequent. This unit seems to think every curve in the road puts you on a new road so it keeps telling you to turn onto the road you're already on. If I'm on Highway 101 for 28 miles, I want my next direction to be Take exit 73 in 28 miles. In 2.3 miles turn left on Highway 101 In 5.8 miles turn right on Highway 101 and so on until you get to exit 73. It's actually a safety problem because you have to spend much more time looking at the GPS to see if the next direction is real or not.<br /><br />So you can see I have a lot of problems with the unit.<br /><br />Other than the above problems, it is a good GPS unit. It is very accurate at estimating when you will arrive by taking live traffic info into account which is very important to me. But the problems I've named above are evil.

Comment:

I bought this for my husband as it was CR rated best for Traffic (we live in LA). It is virtually impossible to use while driving as the menus are long, the satellite signals take forever to load (when my Garmin next to it has already completed a route). It still uses freeways for routes when I programmed it to avoid freeways, and alternitives take too long to load. It is useless for us.

(2 of 2 customers found this review helpful)

Comment:

How can you possibly give any TomTom GPS a recommended buy? Or, at least this one? I have this very unit and it is terrible (especially for one of their top units).My wife and I have used two different but essentially equivalent GPS devices for over two years. One is a Garmin Nuvi (sorry, forget the number) and one is the TomTom Go 740 Live. While the Garmin has its shortcomings -- specifically, map updates that don't update anything, slow screen response, route calculations that are supposedly the fastest but aren't (the fastest route that the unit can calculate isn't the route it presents), etc. -- it's still much better than the TomTom.Both units were bought at the same time and were nearly the top of the line when they were bought. But the TomTom has so many stupid little problems that we have decided it will be our last.Some of the problems:Update the maps and it will wipe out all of you saved favorites. No doubt there is a way to keep it from doing this but it should never have done it to start with. We finally stopped updating the maps to avoid losing our favorites.Park off of the road (such as in a parking lot) and the unit constantly recalculates the route. So forget trying to view the route while you are stopped (if you happen to be off the road).The Live traffic updates are useless. Yes, you can get an update but it usually arrives 30 minutes too late. Many a time I have been in a traffic jam for 10 minutes already, moving at 2 mph, when the unit would tell me that I'm coming up on a traffic delay of 3 minutes. Worthless. I eventually cancelled my real time traffic update account.The unit never knows when it has arrived at the destination. I can follow the route and drive over the top of the end point on the route yet the route never clears on its own. And of course TomTom put the (frequently accessed) clear route button behind three button pushes (you have to go through three screens to get to the clear route button).The unit never remembers certain preferences. Example, you can turn off the voice, then turn off the unit and back on again, and the voices are back. We finally just turned the volume all the way down (fortunately, it remembered that).Clear the route and the unit always defaults back to the 2D mode. Idiotic.The unit randomly restarts itself. Not often (it seems to be related to certain locations in the roads database) but often enough. Then you have to wait for about 3 minutes before its finished starting back up.The route recalculate routine takes about twice as long as the Garmin (we run them side-by-side when we're on a trip). While not a super big deal, you have to remember that this unit spends a LOT of time recalculating routes, so the time adds up.Zoom out on the map and eventually you only see a blank green screen (and your little car in the middle). Why can't at least the major highways show up? We're not talking about zooming out so that you can see the whole of the USA here. It only takes about 6 zoom-outs before you lose all of the roads.Map updates? Who's kidding who here? My 12 year old house is in a typical subdivision, with paved streets and everything. But the map database reminds me that my starting point is on a dirt road every time we go somewhere. And this is after 8 separately purchased map updates. It's been (you guessed it) AT LEAST 12 YEARS since my street has been a dirt road. I've reported the error to TomTom 4 times in two years, and sent in updates myself (via the user submission process), to no avail. A big deal? Maybe, since it involves my hard earned money. I just wonder exactly what have I been purchasing these last two years under the guise of map updates? Personally, I think it should be called the TomTom welfare support fund.Lastly, to finish off my tirade, I couldn't even buy the map updates consistently (this is a TomTom issue, not an issue with the unit). At first, I set up my account to charge my credit card automatically for the map updated, which TomTom did for a few months. Then the automatic charge stopped working and the unit tells me my map update has expired and I have to contact TomTom. I do, TomTom says that their system on its own refuses to use my credit card under my account ID. So we set up a new account ID, same credit card, and it's working again -- for a few months. Then it stops again. So we set it up again under another ID and it's working again -- for a few months. And it stops again. (this is when I decided to stop the map updates anyway because the unit kept deleting my favorites) So instead of creating another account linked to my credit card, I ask TomTom to just tell me what automatic payments were linked to my account (or accounts, depending on how you want to look at it). Their answer (swear to God) was there's no way to tell. Bye Bye TomTom.