TomTom GO 740 Live

Pros: Lane assist
Google search

Cons: Traffic data worst of any traffic data provider (including other TomTom products)
Device randomly resets itself while driving
Bluetooth pairing with phone unreliable
POI search awkward
Non standard USB

Summary: I've been using PDA/Cellphone GPS software for several years and the TomTom Navigator products I thought were the best in terms of UI, stability and general ease of use. I had resisted getting a dedicated GPS unit until I saw the Go 740 Live as I wanted as much as possible a stand-alone system that integrated traffic and extensive POI search.

Unfortunately the Go 740 Live has so far been a major dissapointment. First off I can't figure out the traffic service. I live in a major metropolitan area where I can get mobile traffic coverage from several sources (Google, LiveSearch, TeleNav, Sigalert, ...) and even TomTom Navigator 6 worked pretty well. As far as I can tell the service supported the Go 740 Live is probably missing half the traffic incidents reported by the other services, including the TomTom Navigator 6 software. Evidently they changed the data service provider for the Go 740 Live and it doesn't work.

The next issue is the constant reboots. About once a day (while driving of course), the device resets itself. This appears to be related to when the device is connecting to the TomTom Live network. If the device can't connect to the TomTom service it seems to resort to a reboot at some point (annoying and dangerous when driving, particularly in the dark as during reboot it flashes to full intensity).

The 740 Live is also supposed to pair with a cell phone to handle calls. However the binding only works half the time or so. When the Go 740 Live powers up it doesn't always connect automatically. Sometimes I have to manually reset the Go 740 Live before it will work again. There's also no way of activating the phone's built-in voice recognition from the TomTom UI.

While the Google search is a great feature, there's no easy categories to select from. E.g. you can't with a few clicks find all Pizza restaurants along the route. You'd have to type in "Pizza" on the small keyboard, which is not easy on the small keyboard when driving, so either pull over or do what I do and use the far better interface on Garmin XT that I'm now running on my phone :).

Finally, what's wrong with using standard USB connectors?