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| TomTom GO 920 Portable GPS Vehicle Navigator | 
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| Brand: TomTom
Category: CE
List Price: $449.95
Buy New: $306.16
You Save: $143.79 (32%)
New (25) Used (2) Refurbished (1) from $298.83
Avg. Customer Rating:  68 reviews
Sales Rank: 167
Color: black
Media: Electronics
Autographed: No
Memorabilia: No
Batteries Included: Yes
Native Resolution: 480 x 272
Shipping Weight (lbs): 2
Dimensions (in): 4.6 x 0.9 x 3.3
nv:Type: Receiver
Display: LCD
Expansion Slots: SD Card
Battery Life: 5 hours
Special Features: Bluetooth
Special Features: FM Modulator
Special Features: RDS-TMC traffic compatible
Special Features: 4GB internal flash memory
Special Features: Integrated Microphones And Speaker
MPN: 1M00.980
Model: 1M00.980
UPC: 636926018319
EAN: 0636926018319
ASIN: B000VLHN9E
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Customer Reviews:
 Not Ready For PRIMETIME June 9, 2008
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
My review is based in comparison to the Garmin 370 and Magellan 3140 GPS units.
Whil each unit that I've owned has different bells and whistles, the most important feauture is its routing and user friendliness. The 920, btw, had the latest software/internet updates installed (purchased June 2008).
1.) Based on this, the routing of the TomTom 920 is HORRENDOUS. As other users have mentioned on other sites, the TomTom 920 **loves** LEFT TURNS for some reason. Many times, when I know I need to turn right, the computer voice says to bear left to turn left. The lower left hand corner arrow points left while the larger main map is correctly drawing a right turn up ahead. It's like the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing (no pun intended, LOL). By the time you reach the intersection it corrects itself (late at that). If you're in an unfamiliar area, you'd be in the left turn lane and would need to do a u-turn somewhere based on the voice guiding you wrongly.
Other examples include going from work to home. I took a long irrational route. The 920 corrected itself accordingly as I purposely missed its instructions. And after so many corrections, the machine lost sight of guiding me home and guided me elsewhere...I don't know where, but nowhere near my home. The machine has proven easy to trick.
As I said it loves LEFT TURNS. On the highway, between exits, it says "Keep left". 5 Seconds later, "Keep left". And again "Keep Left". Mind you, it gets annoying when you're on a straight piece of highway. And it does this too many times. Much chattier than the Garmin 370 I have sitting next to it while driving comparing.
Also, sometimes the voice direction CUTS OUT in mid-sentence....i.e. "Turn right on Kirt#@&".... It does this enough times to notice it.
2.) The computer voice is HORRENDOUS. Spanish & English California city and street names are garbled to the point of not being understood at all! My wife couldn't believe the difference compared to the Garmin and Magellan units we had. Knowing that GPS units have been out for some time, it was truly surprising to me how a signature product from TomTom could be lacking so intensely in a refined voice instruction system. It was if it was a 1st generation model (which would be more forgiveable).
3.) The voice input system is HIT and MISS. With a 70%+ MISS rate, especially in the car where there's more noise. It not only gave me the wrong city to start but also garbled the name given to me. LOL. Talk about bad. My wife couldn't stop laughing at how I slowly and clearly pronounced a CA city/street name only to be given a totally wrong choice....it was like a sitcom episode. In the end, due to my frustration, I went back to typing in the names to save time. It's a waste of money to pay extra for this rather useless input feature.
4.) The amount of POIs is **sorely lacking** compared to my Garmin and Magellan units. While it's fun to download user's Starbucks or Borders POIs from their website, it doesn't make up for the fact that there's over 6 million POIs on my Garmin that can almost always guide me to a favorite store. It's truly day and night between these two units.
5.) When entering addresses, the Garmin accepts my addresses immediately and intuitively works with nearby numbers if I input correctly. But when I correctly input "1 Ferry Building" for example, the 920 can't find it/route it or offer alternatives, despite that the Garmin, Magellan, Google Maps, Yahoo Maps, Mapquest find it immediately.
6, etc)
* Other lesser things that irked me with this purchase is that it didn't come with a pleather case to protect the unit or have a wall charger (like my Garmin 370 did on both these counts).
* 10 year old streets missing (in the heart of Silicon Valley). They show up on my Garmin. Unnacceptable, since I'm NOT in the boonies, but in the tech center of the world.
* I also missed the ability to scroll around the map to get a lay of the land like Google Maps or Garmin allows you to do from the get-go (especially helpful if you want to get off the clogged freeway to find alternatives that the routing engine may not have intelligently thought of).
* The FM signal is weak! Virtually useless. Not a fault of TomTom if one knows that all devices are limited by the FCC to limit signal strength for interference purposes.
* Bluetooth only works with GSM phone units (i.e. Cingular, TMobile).
* In order to have the computer name the street names out loud, you're limited to only a "Computer Voice" which is limited to a American and UK woman. The rest of the voices won't prounounce streets. So purchasing Dennis Hopper or Mr. T to give you directions is usless as they can't pronounce street names............Now compare this to the amount of voices Garmin gives you that CAN pronounce street names--DAY & NIGHT difference!
* Traffic info. is outdated by hours and thus, largely usless.
* I disliked the offered color options of its maps (especially night, blah!). For a more knowledgeable person, this can be tweakable by going to their website and dowloading an option.....non which appealed to me aside of the Garmin color option.
* BTW, the map colors you download are apt for buggability. When changing colors on the unit, the unit sometimes would grey out (black and white) with no colors. Rebooting sometimes helped, sometimes it didn't......Sometimes, changing the screens would fix it, sometimes not. And then other times, as you're driving with a grey colorless map, the colors would eventually return to one of the stock maps that came with the unit.
* The unit has a light sensitive and sound sensitive option system. Unfortunately, it gets darker when you don't think it should or stays brighter when you'd think it should get darker. The voice is the same....it gets louder when it shouldn't and quieter when it shouldn't. So I turned both options off as they became frustratingly useless. The night option doesn't automatically come into play when the light sensitive option is taken out, so you have to do it MANUALLY! Blah! I never had this issues with my other units! Thus, you have to put up and leave the finicky light sensitivity option on to get it to go into night mode. The Garmin goes by official sunset times, and it always seemed to do it right. Why o' why doesn't Tomtom do the same thing?
* The lines drawn are JAGGED from closest to furthest zoom settings. It looks like an old Atari game for crissakes! Annoying considering how much you're paying for this unit.
* The screen washes out a little more in strong, direct sunlight than my 370 (tested at same time, same positioning side-by-side). I can still make out detail on the 370, while the 920 washes out to nearly being useless.....amazing considering the 370 has older screen technology.
* Battery is weak due to large screen.
* As others have said, menus are very deep (one screen has 8 pages) and non-intuitive. A menu redesign is in serious order.
* Size is bulky and bulges out in the middle back. Not as easy to pocket vs. the competition w/ 4.3" screens.
* Unit is rubberized. Bank on that the rubber will change colors and peel after some use. Chemistry...."It is what it is."
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Now the plusses:
+ I liked the loud voice of the unit (though it distorts at high volume). Louder than the Garmin.
+/- I like its ability to download the evolving content from the website (this is the future!!). The actual content, however, is more bells and whistles than truly functional. The POIs are good additions, but still pales to Garmin's 6M POIs. The POIs downloader is a **TIME WASTING PAIN** as it takes you to the first screen every time you download something from another screen....so if you downloaded a POI on page 10, you get sent back to page 1 and have to click thru several slow web screens to get back to the last POI download screen.
+ I like its fast calculation of routing a destination (a good speedy computer chip).
+ I like the FAST satellite lock (indoors or out). The best I have encountered!
+ I liked the sale price, especially vs the overly expensive less feature rich Garmins (though they're much more polished).
+ I liked that it had the Euro maps (the **main reason** I bought it), but will never get a chance to test it out since the unit performed so poorly in the States and thus returned.
All in all, this product has a HUUUGE feel that it was rushed to market a year early by an ambitious gun slinging product management director. The 920 has many bells and whistles, but the functionality and "common sense" of many things is lacking. This product could be refined and made better by simple tweaks....non which will probably be addressed until years later on more expensive models.
TomTom uses maps from a different maker than Garmin/Magellan. I always heard that the Garmin maps were better but I didn't want to believe it. Silly me! The difference in the States was staggering (although I hear TomTom's forte is in European maps). The longer/less rational routing algorithm that TomTom (vs. Garmin) uses is pretty bad--is this the mapmakers fault?...I don't know or care...as the unit is going back.
The ambitious bells and whistles give this product a 2* rating. Without the features, a 1* rating is validated as the performance was, YES, that atrocious. This review is objective and not emotional. I really wanted to like it/keep it. Truly!
This is my first TomTom unit. What an introduction. I'm soured on the company.
My advice is buy something else....anything but the 920.
Wake up TomTom! You can do MUCH BETTER!
 Great GPS June 7, 2008
I was a bit incredulous on buying the TomTom GO 920 since I already own a Garmin 350, but I decided to take the plunge. I am happy I did. The box contains a sunction mount and disk, a car charger, USB cable and an installation CD for mapshare. It does not have a case, but in my case I already had a case to use. Here is a list of features or improvements that my Garmin 350 does not have.
1. Loving the widescreen.
2. No pop-up antenna like the Garmin 350.
3. Enhanced position technology should you lose your satellite reception.
4. Voice prompted address entry instead of typing in the information.
5. Mapshare which lets you download maps. You can also correct your maps.
6. Hands free calling.
7. FM transmitter
8. Remote control. I should mention that whomever designed the remote control must have had a bad day, but after messing around with the lock I was finally able to get the remote open to install the enclosed batteries. The trick is you really have to press the tiny lock down very hard. I finally was able to accomblish it with using a flat-edged screwdriver.
9. Abilty to change keyboard to what you want
10. I find that the TomTom customer sevice is good. They also seem to support their product with many updates.
One of the problems I have had with my Garmin GPS is with the slow connection from the satellite feeds. This often takes between 3-5 minutes on a cold start. Well the TomTom 920 picks up the satellites much more quickly. Garmin probably has the TomTom beaten in the graphics department, although not by much and the ease of navigating through the menus. The ease of navaigation on the Garmin is probably easier because there are less features than the TomTom. However, once you play around with the TomTom and get use to all the features it has, operating this GPS becomes second nature. You just have to get use to it and you can look at the enclosed quick start manual or the full manual on the TomTom website. All and all while the TomTom Go 920 is not perfect, the features of this particular GPS are quite rewarding and I am having fun with it and most important of all is that the features work well to make this a great tool for the road.
Edit to original review.
I have had this unit for about a month now and the more I use it the more I like it. The only difficulty I have had is sometimes I feel the routes are not always the ones I would actually choose, but to me this is no big deal since you can program the routes the way you want to and the TomTom redraws the maps much faster than the Garmin does. During the last few days I discovered a wealth of downloads on the TomTom 2 site from voices to maps. You can even download different map colors if you do not like the original colors packaged with the TomTom. Ex: I just downlaoded AAA colors for my maps. They look tremendous. You can not really do this with any Garmin unit. Talking about the maps a bit more I give this example of the comparison between the Garmin unit I have and the TomTom. I live on Long Island and recently had to go on business to the Bronx. The Garmin could not locate the street I needed, but it was on the TomTom map. The Bronx is not a place you want to get lost in. I found this true with other places I have been to. Too often the Garmin could not locate the street. The point is you can not add or correct the data with the Garmin GPS, you have to live with it, but you have the ability to change the data with the TomTom 920. This feature on the TomTom alone is worth its weight in gold and justifies this purchase at least in my view. Also, I haven't found a way to program the Garmin to prepare a route from another location other than where you are at the time, but the feature exists with the TomTom so you can prepare any route and view it from anywhere you like. The only thing I miss from the Garmin GPS is the way it shows the name of lakes and parks as you navigate by them. However, you can program the TomTom to show these points of interest with an apperance of a small icon.
The bottom line is this. As stated above the garmin maps look a bit better, but unless you want to spend $1,000 for a top of the line 880 series Garmin you can get a top of the line TomTom with just about every feature you can think of for 1/3 of the price that the Garmin costs. Do not get me wrong, I still like my Garmin, but I just like the TomTom 920 better.
Second TomTom purchased June 4, 2008
We purchased a TomTom a few years ago. When our daughter went to New Haven to work, we let her borrow it. Of course, we have never seen it since. Finally, we purchased another one. It has been a savior for my daughter. A new town can be very scary; however, with "Thomas" (as she likes to call him) she goes everywhere.
We look at other brand names, but none could compare with TomTom. We are truly satisfied.
Took it to Europe and LOVED it May 27, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
The TomTom is very easy to use and worked flawlessly on my vacation in The Netherlands and Belgium. I'm very happy with it.
Fantastic May 27, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I selected this Model TomTom because we were planning a Fly and Drive trip to Sicily. This model has both North American maps and European maps.
We Just returned from Sicily and the TomTom 920 worked Great. We were all over the island for 8 days and visited different sites each day. We had know problems finding everything we were looking for.
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