Everything's grand..... until update time

I promised additional review of my TomTom Go 720, so here it is.

One of the things I really enjoy about planning a route, other than being able to reject what was offered and choose alternates is Route Demo. This is where you can watch the thing show a 'drive through' demo (at high speed) of the planned route, so you can familiarize yourself with where you'll be going as opposed to looking down on a map. Speaking of map, I did notice some inaccuracies, but these all involved major road work detours, so it was forgivable.

I decided to give the mp3 player feature a try and loaded a couple SD memory cards with mp3s. I was reading a lot of gripes on online forums about the unintuitive-ness of getting music on the TomTom and I see what they mean. You have to use the included PC software as a means of copying the files onto the SD card for it to work 100% guaranteed. OK fine, I'm hip to that. But when I brought the TomTom into the car to try it out, it didn't always boot and instantly recognize the SD card. The FM transmitter built in is a nice feature - one less gadget to carry around - but even with the device cranked to 100% volume, the volume coming through on the radio was quiet and full of noise. This is not good.

The TomTom allows you to switch the units of measure to metric. But when the text to voice reads the distance to the next way point, it says 2 miles when it really means 2 kilometres.

But alas, all the good things about this TomTom were superseded by a major fault - updates. Oh, they had updates. In fact, I was entitled to a free North America map update for 30 days. The problem was getting it downloaded. This task has to be done via the TomTom Home software. The problem I encountered is that the download (almost 2GB) kept quitting after about 10 minutes. Never at the same spot. No alternative to get the update by another means. TomTom insists it's not their problem, yet online forums would indicate otherwise. To their credit, they tried everything surrounding the Home application itself. I even tried changing computers and unblocking ports on my firewall. But nothing worked. And that's a show stopper my friends.

So the mighty TomTom Go 720 is headed back to the store. But its replacement has been spotted. Garmin to the rescue.