TomTom’s 2008 730 model brings their newest community-based navigation advancements together with thei plug and play ease of use, rock-solid navigation, and sleek designs we’ve come to expect from them.
For a couple of years now, TomTom’s been building a foundation for some powerful community-driven navigation features, and this is the year they really start to harness that power. They began by introducing with Map Share, which lets you instantly modify street names, street direction, and custom locations called points of interest (POIs) on your own device, then upload them to TomTom’s HOME network and download changes made by all of the other users. When you do this, TomTom gets to find out what routes your device has been taking. The data is anonymous, but it’s given TomTom an enormous pile of route and speed data, which they’ve used to tie community data to routing with their new IQ Routes™ feature, which calculates routes using the actual recorded average speeds of travel to calculate your trip rather than posted speed limits, giving you an extremely accurate prediction of how long any given route will actually take at any given time. There are a host of other interesting features, and you can read about them here.
As last year, the difference between the 730 and the 930 models is the “Enhanced Positioning Technology”. The 930 contains some onboard accelerometers and gravity sensors that help it figure out where it’s going even if you lose satellite signal for a few minutes, which can be incredibly useful in cities with a lot of tunnels or “urban canyons” of tall buildings, so if you live in an area where that is an issue, you may want to consider bumping up to the 930. Otherwise, this is a superb navigator that will give you everything you need and expect, and then surprise you a bit.
View TomTom GO 730 4.3-inch Touchscreen Portable GPS Navigator with Bluetooth details
