Pros

• Simple to use
• Excellent address voice input
• Premium display
• Customizable
• Clear and loud speakerphone
• Extensive POI
• IQ Routes works well

Cons

• Short battery life
• Gas prices not accurate
• Sometimes quirky routing
• RDS-TMC not useful outside of large metro areas
• No dedicated address voice input button on remote

The Bottom Line
In a crowded GPS field, the TomTom sticks out of the traffic like a big yellow school bus. It will not only get you to Point B but it’ll get you to Point B in a way the competition only wished it could do.

Ratings

Overall:

Ease of Use:

Battery:

Accuracy:

POI:

Speaker Volume:

Price:

Recommended
Yes (Strong)

Full Review
SvenOnTech has tested many TomTom’s all the way back to its Palm offering nearly six years ago. We’ve always loved its easy to read interface and have been impressed with the features offered by the Holland-based navigation company. Always trying to do something different than the other guys, TomTom has continued to improve its devices from integration to Eclipse radios to including hands-free Bluetooth speakerphone. So what did the Dutch come up with for the GO 930? Address voice input. Oh ya, now we’re talking…literally.

Since I’ve teased you with the voice-activation, I guess I’ll touch on it right away and not pain you until the end. To tell you the truth, I was weary of the voice-activation as to if it would really work. Between OnStar, cellular phones, and automated customer service software that routes your call “quicker”, I have not been impressed with voice-activation. VoiceSignal is probably the most accurate voice-activation system I’ve seen (found on many cell phones) but even at 90%, it’s still not good enough. So this is why my doubt weighed heavy on the TomTom GO 930. ‘Is this a gimmick or something useable?’ I thought to myself as I tapped the soft button for the voice-activation.

Once instructed by your finger on the screen to listen to you, the GO 930 will prompt you by a tone to state the name of the city. You speak it and then it calculates what you said. Instead of trying to guess specifically what you spoke, it gives a list of possibilities. You then speak the correct number from the list associated to your city. You repeat this for the street name and then state the street number. The GO 930 will repeat the house number for confirmation and you acknowledge it with “Yes” or “No”. If it’s the latter, it’ll prompt you to say it again. Now, if it’s only off by a number or so, you can use the keyboard to back space and correct it. If the TomTom gets it all correct, you can simply say, “Done,” and it’ll route you. It’s simple, fast, and accurate.

I was impressed with TomTom’s engineers to choose a number confirmation system for the city and street name as this makes more sense in keeping accuracy high. With so many towns and streets sounding very similar and add in accents, it is very difficult for even a large powerful computer to get it right. TomTom did well with this system. What surprised me, though, was that the supplied remote didn’t have a dedicated button to the voice activation. So you either add it as a favorite and transverse the screen with your finger or remote or dig through the menus to get it. Not a smart way to cap off such a great feature.

So is it better than VoiceSignal or GM’s attempt at voice recognition in its over-rated OnStar? In a word, absolutely. My wife was probably more hesitant for me to test this out than I was because she has had to bear the brunt of my frustration with past devices sitting in the passenger seat listening to me scream out a command repeatedly. “I said CALL TOM JONES!” “Did you say, ‘Delete Address Book?’ Ya, how ‘bout delete that OnStar account? While using the GO 930’s voice activation, I was always surprised that my city or street was nearly always the number one choice. From time to time, it ranked two or three, but never further than that. The 930 did have some difficulty with the house numbers in the beginning, but I soon realized just stating the numbers in a regular voice not pausing between numbers increased accuracy immensely. In short, it became quicker to enter an address via my mouth than my finger. Amazing.

Other new features on the 930 include “Advanced Lane Guidance” and “IQ Routes”. Advanced Lane Guidance gives you, “Extra clarity when navigating difficult junctions by indicating which lane to move into.” Essentially, it shows you a “picture” (see my example of the I-80 / I-5 interchange) of the interchange and guides you to the correct lane with a nice large green arrow. Having traveled through LA, San Francisco, San Jose, San Diego, Phoenix, and Tucson in the past, to name a few large cities, this thing will help a lot of people in cities likes these that leave you second guessing the GPS. In short, the lane images are fantastic in helping you get in the proper lane on those complicated interchanges. If a picture isn’t available, the bottom left of the screen will display arrows for each lane indicating which lanes are the off-ramp lanes. I can tell you first hand that this works excellently as I used it twice in Sacramento alone.

In larger metro areas, the map additionally displays buildings within the city blocks. These 3-D buildings are surprisingly accurately placed and really help get your barring straight in a concrete jungle. It made navigation much easier while downtown.

So what about that IQ Route thing. Does it really work? Well after testings a Harman/Kardon, Navman, Dash Express, and a Navicon (ala BMW GPS), the TomTom GO 930 is the first GPS to take me home truly the shortest way. While all others force me to continue down the state highway, TomTom, like myself, gets off early onto a surface street that cuts to my home quicker than staying on the highway. During testing, I would have it navigate to destinations I’ve been too previously and know the fastest way to it and in nearly most cases, IQ Route agreed with my way. Nice.

Nearly all test routes I entered brought me to the correct address; however, TomTom did have a handful of mixed up directions. For example, I searched for a Starbucks in the Point of Interests and proceeded to follow its instructions. The coffee shop was, and I emphasize was since it was a Safeway Starbucks and the grocery store was no longer there, in a strip-mall on Florin Road in Sacramento. I was traveling west and coming up to a light that allowed for a left turn into the mall. TomTom instead suggested I pass it, make the next right, enter another shopping center, drive through the parking lot and exit at the same light I would pass and simply drive across Florin Road into the center that was to the left of me. Huh? Knowing this was just too silly to believe, I snapped a picture of it at the light with my iPhone. Take a look and marvel with me. TomTom never commented to why it would have done this when I inquired about it.

Another really odd routing issue crept up in the back country of Sacramento. I had to meet a client at their home in Plymouth (California) and the GO had me go and make a right at the T intersection instead of a left. Yanking the iPhone out and looking up the address on Google Maps revealed the proper location of the home. Oddly enough, both Google Maps and TomTom use the same map vendor, TeleAtlas. Mmmm. On the way home, I took the suggested route of the client and the TomTom kept “correcting” to a slower path. In fact, at one point it suggested an unpaved road! TomTom’s IQ Route for the quickest way to Point B failed horribly here. Again, no comment from TomTom after submitting the address to it for explanation.

Now let me please point out that for the majority of routes tested on the TomTom GO 930, it excelled in its routing. We tested it locally in Sacramento, Elk Grove, Stockton, Modesto, and in the Clear Lake area (all California). The TomTom always did very well. No one, or device, is perfect. Right? The minor goof ups is just a reminder to always verify your directions with another source prior to setting out on your journey into unknown waters or you may sink.

The GPS comes with a dock station for you to use to update the software and maps, add navigation voices, gas prices, color themes, startup and shutdown pictures, as well as added Point of Interests (POI). I was highly impressed with the POI updates that the user community had uploaded for free use by others. I grabbed Starbucks and In-n-Out which did show the ones in my area accurately. The start up screen was changed to a picture of my Ford F-250 (white) that I found on the web via Google Images. A cowboy riding off into the sunset was my shutdown screen.

I was less impressed with the fuel prices, though. One hit claimed a very low price for diesel and when I called the service station to verify the price, it was off by more than 50 cents than what the TomTom GO 930 reported. The price list had been updated the night before. I found this to be the case more than not. I simply ignored this feature within a week of use. Regular fuel may be more accurate for other areas.

If you’re lucky enough to have a cell phone that the carrier hasn’t retarded its Bluetooth functionality, then you’ll be able to take advantage of TomTom’s traffic updates. If not, then you can use the external RDS-TMC antenna. I tried out the latter since Apple and AT&T decided to not let my iPhone talk to other device such as the TomTom GO 930. Unfortunately, the RDS-TMC really didn’t find a local radio station transmitting the needed data in Sacramento (ya, it’s times like these I wonder why it’s the capitol of California) but did show when traveling further south in the Modesto area. Thing is, Modesto has one freeway (CA-99) and it’s rarely congested. So again, another ignored feature after a week of testing. Those is larger metro areas such as the Bay Area, LA, and San Diego, may find this useful.

As previously mentioned, you can download some voices for your TomTom. We tried out John Cleese, Dennis Hopper, and Mr. T. It is a kick to be guided by these celebrities but it does get a bit old after a while. Honestly, Mr. T was the best voice we had but when my two-year old daughter started laughing like Mr. T from the back seat, we knew it was time to change it.

Running down the little things, we found the battery to last just about four hours coming under the claimed five. The hands-free Bluetooth speakerphone is awesome. The speaker is loud and clear and callers never complained about the quality of sound on their end. The 930 is small enough to fit in your shirt pocket and the mount is easy to use and not large at all. You can use it’s integrated FM transmitter to have it play audio queues on your car stereo along with music from its built-in music player or from the AUX input for your MP3 player. The 4.3” screen is clear and beautiful and rarely was difficult to read even in direct sun light. The GPS was quick to find the helpers out there in the Earth’s atmosphere and get you rolling quickly. Branded POIs are a welcomed sight as well as the ability to share map information with other TomTom users. Lastly, the remote seems like a joke at first, but proved quite useful after the initial laugh.

Overall
So what do we think of the TomTom GO 930? Even with its quirky routing issues we had a couple of times, we loved it. With its excellent display and interface, easy to use menu, fabulous address voice input, nifty remote, excellent hands-free speaker phone, helpful Advanced Lane Guidance, and extensive as well as branded Point of Interests database, you can’t go wrong with this GPS.

Price: $499.95

Platform: Independent (Dash-mount GPS)

Website: TomTom GO 930

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