Here is my conclusion about the TomTom GO 930 T as far as I can judge now.
In-Car performance
I’m still very impressed on how fast the nav gets a loc. Entering a destination address is easy as always. you can choose from the following destination types:
- Home
- Favourite
- Address
- Last destination
- Point of Interest (from the internal POI-Database)
- My Location (navigate to my current position? me is confused)
- Location on map (point where you want to go)
- Latitude / Longitude
- TomTom Buddy
- Last stop (cool to find your car again 🙂 )
When you approach an intersection or exit on the motorway, the nav shows you a schematic drawing of the road(s) ahead and which exit to use, if data is available.
the TMC Feature is veeery nice. You just have to interpret correctly what the nav is telling you. Short example to show you what i mean:
Few days ago, the nav told me that there was a traffic jam before the Gubrist Tunnel and a wait of about 15 mins. In its generosity it asked me if it should re-calculate the route to minimise wait times. Of course I accepted the offer thankfully and followed the directions blindly. It lead my straight trhough Zurich City at 7:30 on a work-day. In the end i’ve lost more time than I whould have through the jam before the Gubrist.
You see, you have to see the information of the nav in context. Motor-way jams are either there or they arent. The usual downtown-Traffic-light-mayhem is usually not reflected in TMC. For more details on how it works, check the Wikipedia-article.
Bluetooth headset
Another very nice feature is the bluetooth headset functionality. After pairing your phone using the wizard on the nav, you can make and receive calls direcly from the nav. You can pair multiple phones, which is very useful if you have one for business and a private one, like me.
If you like, you can even copy your phonebook to the nav. This happens in the background and doesn’t disturb you while using it otherwise. downside to that is, that you don’t see when its finished. However, you can only have one phonebook on the nav, so if you have different directories on your phones, you will have to copy it every time you switch phones. For my 400-something contacts it takes about 3-5 minutes to copy.
The nav even tells you when you received a new SMS text message. If you install the appropriate Language-pack, it even reads the SMS aloud. It’s not so comfortable with foreign languages, but thats usually good for a laugh 🙂
Writing SMS or dialling numbers over the nav is possible, but a bit fumbly. I wouldn’t do it while driving along the motorway with 120Km/h.
In the Next part, I’ll get into the features when connected to a PC.