Design
Although the TomTom Go 720 retains the same, familiar TomTom design cues, including the D-shaped cross-section, it manages to feel like a AU$799 unit. This is thanks to the black, rubberised coating which adorns its body and the metal highlight down its back, which houses both the speaker grille and the mounting point for the windshield mount. The body feels great in the hand -- the metal highlight is particularly dreamy -- and push all the right buttons if you're wandering through your local store looking for a GPS.
The mount is the usual compact unit TomTom ships with its GPS navigators which, with its stubby form-factor, is great for stowing in a cluttered glove box. Sufficient viewing adjustment is provided by the ball-arm. However, the lack of a lever arm for the suction cup means that short, sharp ruts on the road -- which for New South Wales drivers are all too frequent -- often sends the GPS unit crashing down in a haze of sound and fury.
As with the rest of the TomTom range, the 720 is devoid of any physical buttons, except the power button. With the 720's interface, TomTom have elected to leave well enough. Doing basic tasks is pretty simple with the usual array of large menu buttons. There's also a "done" button which, in most menus, skips us back to the map screen. And the map graphics on the 720's 4.3-inch screen, though lacking the pizzazz of some other brands, is effective enough.
Features
In 2007, a AU$799 GPS unit can't sell on a big screen alone, it needs features. To that end, TomTom has gilded the Go 720's lily with Bluetooth hands-free, text-to-speech, MP3 playback and an FM transmitter.
We like text-to-speech because hearing "turn left on to Bent Street" is significantly better than a generic "turn left". Although in the 720's case, TomTom have omitted the "on to", leaving us with the rather grating "turn left Bent Street". There's a choice of two text-to-speech voices, an acceptable English one, and an American voice which sounds eerily like the cold, hollow and just a little bit evil computer generated voices of the mid '80s. Neither deal with Australian nor apostrophised street names particularly well. Compounding our frustration is the fact that the text-to-speech voices aren't preloaded onto the 720. This is particularly odd because TomTom has gone to the effort of pre-installing the latest R14 Sensis maps on the 720, instead of distributing them on SD card. To get text-to-speech working, you have install TomTom Home onto your PC, connect the 720 and transfer.
Route instructions and MP3s can be played through the car stereo via the Go 720's built-in FM transmitter. The FM transmitter is fairly weak and more prone to interference than the iPod FM transmitters we've come across. So in order for instructions or music to be audible, the car stereo volume will need to be turned quite high -- double the normal levels on our car's system. Should you accidentally switch sources without turning down the volume, you run the real risk of damaging your speakers. During our time with the 720, we couldn't get MP3s to play off straight off SD card, we had to load music files onto the Go 720's internal memory via our PC. However, a 720 user on the CNET.com.au forums has found a workaround -- load the MP3 files into an MP3 folder on the card to have them recognised by the GPS (see the thread here).
All Bluetooth hands-free calls can only heard through the 720's internal speaker. However, the ring-back tone isn't played through the 720, so you'll have no idea, until you get an engaged signal or your friend picks up, whether you successfully pressed the dial button just before the lights turned green. Even more annoyingly, though, on several occasions we lost all FM and internal speaker output when we attempted to answer or make a call using the 720's Bluetooth hands-free. In these instances neither party could hear each other even though the call had been connected. The only way to free the TomTom's voice from the cone of silence was to shut it down and start it up again.
Unfortunately a few good features available in overseas versions of the 720 haven't survived the trip across the Indian Ocean. Sensis have reportedly put the kibosh on the Map Share feature, which allows users to make corrections to the maps, as well download corrections that others have made. This would be useful as the Sensis maps are not without error and, with its one year update cycle, unable to keep up with temporary road blocks and restriction changes. Another missing feature is speech recognition for street names.
Performance
When surrounded by tall buildings in the CBD, the Go 720 fared worse than the previous batch of GPS navigators to pass through the CNET.com.au offices -- with location confusion happening earlier and signal drop out occurring on a more regular basis. The suggested routes will get you from A to B; sometimes they're remarkably good, but oftentimes they'll cause well versed local drivers to snigger at its ineptitude. Then again, as any student who's gone through a computing degree will tell you, path-finding in real-world environments is a difficult task.
If you connect the Go 720 frequently to your home PC -- and we're not sure how many people would actually do that -- the TomTom Home software will use its QuickGPS Fix feature to update the 720 with the latest locations of the GPS satellites, allowing for quicker satellite lock during start-up.
For AU$799, though, doing an OK job at navigating may have been acceptable a year or two ago. Nowadays, the entry-level units from TomTom, Navman and Mio kick off at AU$399 and do a similar, if not better, job than the Go 720. And for AU$499, you can get a wide-screen unit, possibly with Bluetooth or text-to-speech or both. Don't fall for the 720's gorgeous and tactile body, AU$799 is too much to pay for a GPS navigator with a weak FM transmitter, buggy Bluetooth and grammatically incorrect text-to-speech.
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