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- Average user rating: 3.0 stars out of 138 reviews Back to product review
- My rating: 0 stars
Full user review
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50 out of 51 people found this review helpful
4.5 stars
"Capable, but challenging on cross country trips"
Pros: Simple interface
Cons: dim view, tough to travel between sections of country
Summary: I wanted a GPS for a recent trip from California to New Mexico and settled on the Tom Tom Go Plus. I got a great price (599) from Harmony Computers and took it on my trip, learning as I traveled. I chose a famale voice for audio directions, and soon Tom Tom became "Doris" as we traveled through California, Arizona and New Mexico.
Doris gave nearly flawless advice. Several times when our common sense told us Doris was wrong, she wasn't. Only two times did she get confused and give us directions we simply could not follow, like continuing on a dead end road, 0r telling us to turn left down a street when we had already arrived at our destination. The Tom Tom system is pretty easy to use right out of the box.
My gripes:
1) The screen, set at maximum brightness is pretty darned hard to read sitting on my dash when I'm wearing sunglasses. I haven't tried or even seen any other GPS units, so I don't know how it compares with others, but it's a pain to have to remove my prescription sunglasses to see some fine point that Tom Tom is displaying.
2) The Go Go Plus model, which I bought, has the advantage of having all the US maps on one SD card. However, a user still has to select regional maps to find anything but major highways in 'other' regions. For instance, in traveling from Kingman Arizona to Alburquerque New Mexico, I could not enter my hotel address in Alburquerque when I was traveling with my Western States map loaded... New Mexico, accoring to Tom Tom, is a Southern state and is mapped in another region. If I selected that Southern map when I was still physically in Arizona, Tom Tom had no idea how to map my present location. The way around this is to use the Major US Highway map and create a pseudo destination at a major highway intersection near your true destination... this allows you to see both where you are and where you are going.
3. Tom Tom sometimes has funny ways of getting you to your destination. I suspect all GPS units do this. I used it in my neighborhood and it concocted some truly creative ways to get me places. What is truly amazing is to see how quickly the unit recalculates routes when you don't make the turn that it tells you to... within seconds, it comes up with a new way to get you to your destination.
All in all, I'm pleased with the unit, despite the small gripes. It's small, easy to use and provides interesting feedback on your trip, including vehical speed, time and distance to the next turn, and points of interest along the way.
- 2 replies to this review
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=> I agree with MartySB, and want to add this: in my GO 300, and using my prescription sunglasses, the display seems completely black. When tilting my head, I begin to see something. Apparently the display cover is polarized vertically, so to cancel all light with typical polarized glasses.
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I have an "older" GARMIN Street Pilot III+ which does things differently. Unlike the more modern ones, it does not use an SD/MMC card for storage, it uses a proprietary memory module so you can not possibly store the entire USA on it at once; however, you don't have to store entire "regions" on it either.
You pick & choose various 'chunks' of map datum to build the street-level detail database which is then uploaded to the memory module; so, it could easily have done your road trip seamlessly without "getting lost" between regions provided the detail data was present. Like other GPS units, it has the Major US Highways basemap built-in on ROM so even if you go out of the detail area, you can still find your way.
TomTom GO:
