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| TomTom GO 730 4.3-Inch Widescreen Bluetooth Portable GPS Navigator | 
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| Brand: TomTom
Category: CE
List Price: $449.95
Buy New: $293.49
You Save: $156.46 (35%)
New (10) Used (4) Refurbished (1)
Avg. Customer Rating:  30 reviews
Sales Rank: 878
Color: Black
Media: Electronics
Memorabilia: No
Batteries Included: No
Native Resolution: 480 x 272
Display Size: 4.3
Includes MP3 Player: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 4.1
Dimensions (in): 3.3 x 4.7 x 1
MPN: GO 730
Model: GO 730
UPC: 636926020138
EAN: 0636926020138
ASIN: B00160GOR6
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Customer Reviews:
Great but far from perfect December 6, 2008
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
I bought a TomTom 730 about a month ago for a week-long road trip from the San Francisco bay area to the Los Angeles area. I relied on it completely, and it never failed. The routes seemed strange sometimes, but they always worked.
The good:
* The interface is easy to use after getting to know it a bit. It was easy to learn.
* The screen looks great, and the touchscreen is easy to use.
* For complicated freeway interchanges (which LA is famous for), the 730 shows a graphic with which lane(s) you need to be in. Extremely helpful.
* The voice prompts are very useful (i.e. "turn left in 200 yards, then keep right").
* There are a ton of useful POI files you can download from TomTom and other places depending on what you are interested in. For instance, all state parks, or Costco locations, or campsites, or ATMs.
* The 730 is very customizable, although it requires digging through some menus. It's not something you want to do on the go.
* If you get stuck in traffic, it notices you're not moving quickly and starts thinking of alternate routes.
The bad:
* Text to speech for street names is unusable, especially for Spanish place names (i.e. most of California). I can understand it wouldn't know how to pronounce the names of obscure towns, but I would think it would know how to pronounce Los Angeles (which came out something like "Los. An. Hell. Ess."). For some reason it always said "US one west one" for US 101, which was confusing. I left it enabled for laughs, but had to rely on the screen to know what it was talking about.
* When entering an address to navigate to, some streets don't allow you to input the address. You need to provide a cross street instead. This is impractical when you have no idea where the address is. Of course, if you know where you're going, you don't bother with GPS. To work around this, I used Google maps with their send-to feature, which worked great.
* The POIs are just a name, address and maybe phone number. Knowing that there are 12 restaurants nearby would be a lot more useful if you could pull up some details about them like what kind of food they serve and reviews. Some kind of integration with Zagat or chowhound would be very useful.
* Screen is very hard to see in direct sunlight. Maybe some sort of shade would help.
* Sometimes addresses wouldn't correspond exactly with their physical location. For instance, the Howard Johnson's location next to Disneyland confused the TomTom quite a bit. I could see the building in front of us from the freeway offramp, but it wanted us to get back on the freeway heading the other way. So you can't always follow its directions blindly.
All in all, it's a great device and very helpful. Maybe in a couple of years they'll have the text to speech stuff worked out.
good GPS - still raw around the edges December 3, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
Overall this is one of the best GPS units available.
Positives:
It's very quick to establish the initial satellite connection and even quicker to calculate routes or re-routs. This is critical to any driver who makes a wrong turn on a complicated intersection and needs to be bailed out quickly. In a city the slow GPS would force you to stop and wait until the new route is calculated. With TomTom, the new route will be ready before you reach the next intersection and it will allow you to correct your mistake easily. I also like the bluetooth phone integration provided by TomTom. It not only gives you basic hands-free calling while in a car but also loads the entire phone book into unit to make calls using touchscreen UI and allows to call thousands and thousands of POIs (Points of Interest) that are already preloaded into the unit with the US map. This is very handy when you travel in new place and want to find a nearby hotel and call them to make a reservation all while you are driving. I also like the fact that once someone calls you, TomTom would automatically temporarily mute music and voice guidance directions, so that you can have a normal conversation without any background noise.
Who cares:
Lane guidance, IQ routes and voice prompts are not usable in their current implementation. They really become small quirks that you get tired of after the initial excitement and never use again. Lane guidance shows you the same picture regardless of the actual intersection, so you are as good just looking at the road signs to make sure you take the right exit. IQ routes are really not that smart. I was driving in and around Los Angeles while on trip to California and TomTom was constantly putting me on a congested highways never once suggesting that there might be a quicker local route. Not mentioning that it was trying to take me through the downtown every time I needed to cross the city. Back home TomTom never 'learned' from me the shortcuts that I take every day on a way to work and back. Three months of usage and it still suggests to me the same route that I know is not optimal. Nevermind that TomTom always shows time to the destination based on it's own calculations on the speed limits and not on my history. Voice prompts are very unreliable and it is really just easier to use touchscreen to type in new address or find a POI rather then spelling it's name to the microphone.
Negatives:
The screen is not very bright - it washes out way too quickly in a strong day light and there is no hood that you can use to mitigate that problem. The built-in speakerphone is the cheapest version that they could find as it's not loud enough and lacks any fidelity. FM modulator that allows you to use the car speakers is not strong enough and can be easily disrupted by a strong FM radio station on a close frequency. If you drive on a long trip where local stations change frequently, you need to constantly hunt for empty frequency and it becomes very annoying. Never mind that FM modulator does not work for phone calls. But these all are gimmicks. One really serious drawback in my view (and it actually the drawback for any GPS on the market right now, regardless of vendor) is the inability to easily dictate the route based on your preference. I'll give one example. I live in Connecticut and often have to travel to New Jersey which means I have to cross the Hudson in some place. Most bridges are located in a very close proximity to NYC and to avoid the inevitable congestions I want to take the most remote bridge possible. Well, try to tell TomTom that. Unless you know the name of the small town, situated right on the bank of the river by the bridge you want to take, there is no way I could find to map my directions. TomTom should be smart enough to realize that river crossing point should be included as an option to route as it is most often is the most critical point of any route. There are many examples like that where unless you know the local area very well, you would be frustrated trying to program the route. When we were travelling in California and visited the Grand Canyon, I could not map my route from nearby Flagstaff as I did not know the name of the town, associated with Grand Canyon in TomTom's memory and there was no other way to find a POI based on the other preferences. The preference 'find POI near your location' did not pick up Grand Canyon entrance even though we were only 50 miles away from it. And I could not search based on state where POI is located. This is stupid. Also, TomTom has many categories for it's internal database of POIs but they are too fragmented and unless you know exactly which category the particular POI is associated with, you are forced to do a generic search in which case, attractions as popular as Grand Canyon or Yosemite become drown in a limitless lists of local establishments, trying to get your business based on the name.
 One problem November 24, 2008
4 out of 6 found this review helpful
4.0 out of 5 stars One problem, November 24, 2008
By radman "radman2020" (USA) - See all my reviews
I have the 720. The 730 has only minor improvements once you update the 720...so I thought I would tell about one feature that is a problem... Maybe TomTom will fix this if they see that it drives away (no pun intended) potential customers.
The features and operation of the TomTom Go series are amazing... I think they are much better than Garmin or my built in volvo navtek system EXCEPT FOR ONE IMPORTANT FEATURE:
You can't search with a street address (and state) only. You MUST have the town name or you won't get a result. This is a problem in suburbs where every mile or so, there is a different town name...names that even the people that live there don't know because they go by the Metro area name. If you don't know the name of that small suburb, you are stuck. All the other makers allow you to put in the state and street name and then let you pick from a list of results from each jurisdiction.
They need to fix this. I cannot fathom why they would leave you out in the cold like this. If you use this, make sure you know in advance the town name or zip code or you are stuck.
TOMTOM... fix this problem!
Good functionality, but software has bugs November 11, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
The directions, ease of use and excellent routing give this product 3 stars. The reason for not having 5 is the occasional need for a paper-clip hard reset. The unit will lockup from time-to-time, we will lose voice routing or sometimes not shut-off all leading to a hard reset. Maybe we got a bad battery, but brand new the battery never works more then 30 minutes. Also voice at the loudest setting will not work on battery.
Great, but not Good November 5, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
In the ad, Tom Tom 730 is advertised as having lane guidance--But what it doesn't tell you is that it doesn't work unless you are in a big city and you have to have 4 lanes of traffic before it activates. After contacting Tom Tom downloading new applications and a new map, it still doesn't work. Too bad that it doesn't work in Tampa, Sarasota, or St. Petersburg, Fl.--but then again they must be small cities. Tom Toms answer is that it seems OK but maybe there is a problem?
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