TomTom GO 730 Review

So after loads of research and numerous returnage to find the GPS thats right for me I ended up waiting 2 months to purchase the TomTom 730. I found it a week after it released in the US at www.gpscentral.ca, I was expecting it to take longer to come up to Canada as with everything else but I snapped it up as soon as I saw it on shopbot.ca.

I bet you’re thinking “why wait when there is so much choice on the market?” well reason is that the new features of the 730 are very significant to the previous models and when you compare to other brands for the price you do get alot of features crammed in there.

There is no differences between the 730 and 930 that I found except the 930 came with European, US and Canadian maps however the 730 model only comes with US and Canadian maps.

So let me break down the features I found useful and what it all means to us

• IQ Guidance
  • Keeps a database of all TomTom GO 730/930 user’s average speed, road, day and time of day and shares it across community over the internet
  • Accurately shows the estimated time of arrival based on the IQ guidance data
  • Calculates fastest route based on the IQ guidance data
• Voice Input
  • Allows you to speak instead of typing in names
• Line Guidance Maps
  • Shows you a heads up of the correct lands to be in on major highways (US only at the mo)
• Bluetooth and POI dialing
  • Acts as a bluetooth headset for you to take calls
  • Point of Interest database has phone numbers and dialing is easy
• Mapshare
  • Users can correct maps on their own devices
  • Corrections are sent to TomTom over the internet when the GPS is cradled
  • Corrections are then sent down to the rest of the user community for free

Plus tonnes of other features like free map updates, MP3 player, FM radio transmitter (GPS audio and MP3), Custom colour themes, automatic volume adjustment, automatic daylight sensor, “where am I?” feature, speed limit reminder and alerts for school zones, custom and downloadable POI and many more.

I like the IQ guidance feature its amazingly accurate I have tried to beat the ETA it gave me at the beginning of my journey and based on my ‘more than average’ speed i was doing it calculated a new ETA right away. Also the Lane Guidance was very handy when trying to tackle those really tricky turnpikes in the US.

Voice Input is good too and have used it a few times but its far from a handfree input. You have to press the voice button then say the name, then it shows of a list of all the matches and then you have to select the correct one from the list. I’m sure they’ll fix this soon, if enough consumers complain about it.

Overall the device is very good and very fast at calculating routes. However I’m finding a few duplicates in the Point of Interest database and some weird roads that span across lakes! These are bad corrections that come of other users of the Mapshare feature … pretty annoying, however you can control what you recieve by choosing “Only download corrections from tomtom” instead of “download corrections from all users”

The other potential deal breaker for some is the lack of querying when searching for a street address without a city. Sometimes in big cities you might get street addresses under a suburb name rather than the major city name so its sometimes trial and error when looking for addresses. Also the less than sturdy window mount doesn’t really suit the high end category this GPS fall in to. These are old problems which TomTom have not addressed and I really think that they need to ASAP.

The TomTom 730 is a keeper. By comparsion, a really good buy and I recommend to anyone looking for a high end GPS and not looking to spend over $500.

Price

TomTom GO 730 ~$459

TomTom GO 930 ~$479

Comparable Models

Garmin Nuvi 760 ~$699