I wrote before about my TomTom Go 700 portable GPS system. Now I’ve graduated to the newer version, the TomTom 910. I hadn’t expected to make the jump so soon, but a number of things came together to push me toward this nice new device.

My old TomTom Go 700 was great, but maps were only for Europe. As a result, I depended on using TomTom Navigator 5 on my Dell Axim PDA for trips to the US, since I have US maps for that. Sadly, on my last trip, I made the mistake of plugging the car charger not into the PDA cradle but instead into the Bluetooth GPS receiver. Smoke, literally smoke, came out of it as I put 12 volts into a socket that only wanted 5 volts.

Ouch. There went my solution for GPS when driving in the US. Of course, perhaps it was fate. I was well tired of using my PDA for satellite navigation. You have to hook up the PDA cradle to the windshield, then plug the charger into the cradle, then put the PDA in the cradle, then run the cable from the charger into the Bluetooth receiver, then plug the sound cable from the PDA into the cradle….hassle. With an all in one Tom Tom, you hang it on the windshield, plug in the charger if you really want, and you’re done.

More fate. Soon after this happened, the new TomTom range was announced. While I was debating an upgrade, a friend said he was interested in getting a TomTom Go 700 for trips between England and France. So now he’s off using my old TomTom, while I’m driving along with the new one. Gotta love fate!

Some links, then some comparisons between the two devices, from my perspective. Product info is here. Pocket GPS World has a very nice review here: Inside the TomTom GO 910. And that done, here are my thoughts.

The first reason I wanted the TomTom 910 was that it has both European and US maps stored on its 20 GB hard drive. That gives me a solution for both countries — as well as Canada, Guam and the Canary Islands!

It also locks on to satellites faster. My old TomTom could take a couple of minutes to get going from a cold start. The new one only takes seconds. Nice!

It’s slightly smaller and has a widescreen. Widescreen, square screen — doesn’t make that much of a difference to me, but the smaller size for carrying is nice.

The new version can do RDS-TMC, which means listen to regular radio transmissions for traffic alerts and keep me notified. The bad news is, that’s not built in. You have to buy an external antenna, which is annoying. And you can’t even buy them yet at all. Keep a watch for when they are offered here.

The new version can play MP3 files. I’ll come back to this, but it’s very handy. Unfortunately, the interface for adding music sucks. You either have to select individual songs to copy across (hmm, which of my hundreds of tracks will I select one by one) or you copy across playlists. I don’t have playlists, but I’ll have to start making these to move music to the TomTom faster. It would be nice if you could see songs by albums or artists and tick across selections that way. (Note — it’s also pretty likely that simply browsing to the TomTom in Windows Explorer will allow you to drag and drop music. Haven’t tried it yet, but a quick look makes me hopeful).

You can also put pictures on it (and with a third party hack covered in that Pocket GPS World article, even play movies). I put a few pictures on the device, but it wasn’t a killer feature for me.

Speed camera locations — now that was a killer feature. It comes with a list of known speed cameras for various countries, including the UK. There were ways to put this into the old TomTom, but now it’s built in and much easier to use.

How’s it working so far? I’ve done three trips so far in the run up to the real hammering it will get on my upcoming US trip.

My first trip was from Heathrow out to Wiltshire. I’d got my TomTom from Dixons in the duty free area, hence me using it to get me back from the airport even though I know the way cold. I just wanted to see how it worked.

I pre-plotted a route, to test if selecting points of interest had improved. I wrote previously how annoying it was that there was no way to search by name for points. Now you can. Choose Navigate To, Point Of Interest, POI Near You (or another option), then Any POI Category, then within a set range (say 150 miles near you), then start typing letters to see if there’s a match for what you’re looking for. Doing this found Stourhead, something that puzzled me with the TomTom 700 earlier this year. It could be a heck of a lot easier, but it’s at least possible now. And locating Heathrow was a heck of a lot easier

Route planning is fast, and off I went. It quickly starting flagging speed cameras on the M25, giving me chimes and then showing a countdown to them. Very handy. The only downside is that it didn’t know construction is done near Heathrow and so the 40 MPH restriction is gone. Instead, there’s a variable speed limit that is shown by signs. So it warned me I was speeding, when I wasn’t. Keep checking those signs.

I love a new feature that shows you the speed limit of roads you are traveling on, if these are known. But I hate the fact that if you go more than five miles per hour above that limit, it changes to a red color and starts flashing.

Say you’re on the motorway. It would show you something like this: 68/70. That tells you you’re going 68 with a limit of 70. Now if you step up to 75, it shows you this: 75/70. But instead of white text, it changes to very hard to read deep red and begins flashing. I wish there was an option to disable this, but so far, no luck.

I quickly noticed something many people are commenting on — mount droop. Slowly, the monitor starts to droop on its mount. It’s easily corrected with a gentle push up, but it’s not something you should have to do. And toward the end of my trip, when I went from the motorway to B roads, a big bump made it drop almost straight-down. In addition, a big bump — or when you’d put the unit back up, would cause it to disconnect from the power supply contacts in the mount. It’s not a big deal for me, but those with older 910s had a big problem because a power disconnect would cause the unit to go off. New software has fixed this.

I’ll come back mount issues in a bit, but back to my first trip. The TomTom can also interact with your phone (or phones, it can remember several), just as the old one can. If you have the right phone (I don’t), it will even read text messages to you. This is because it has a new computerized voice, rather than just the prerecorded ones.

The computerized voice is also handy because it will read road names to you. The convinced me to leave behind my old voice Jane, with her nice British accent, for Kate. Kate’s also British, she’s just a computerized voice. She sounds pretty good, though I feel some guilt over having left Jane behind.

Kate’s funny, though. She kept calling the motorway the freeway. Now being a Californian, that kind of made me happy. But it feels wrong. When in Britain, I call them motorways — and so should British Kate. But this might be because although I chose a British voice, my language preference is set to English US rather than English UK. Someday, maybe I’ll even test this to find out.

Kate’s also funny in that she says road numbers incorrectly. Well, just differently. Say you’re on the A303. Everyone will call that the Three Oh Three. But formal Kate, she calls it the Three Hundred Three. On a B road, she starts getting into thousands. I can’t wait to get back to Southern California and see if she calls the 405 the Four Hundred and Five rather than the Four Oh Five.

My second trip was an easy run to the local leisure center. Again, I knew the way — I just wanted to test things out. I always take the GPS down and even remove the mount for security reasons. So when heading back home, I had to put it back into place. That’s easy, but then I was shocked to watch the unit fall off the windshield. I put it back up again, taking care to make sure it was twisting it the way it should. Down it came again, and this time the splash screen didn’t go off. No menu, no nothing.

Great — I was annoyed that the mount clearly doesn’t work well, plus that perhaps the hard drive was now crashed. A reset button was nowhere in sight, and pushing the main power button didn’t help.

When I got home, I discovered that to reset the unit, you have to turn it upside down, then there’s a hard-to-find reset slot where a paper clip can be used. Fortunately, pushing that was all I needed to get the unit going again.

Still, the mount issue was a problem. Going online, I came across plenty of people reporting issues. The article I mentioned earlier talks about this, as well. I didn’t know if I wanted to keep the device with these problems.

TomTom’s clearly aware of these issues. For one, they’ve had to make special page completely with video to explain how to use the mount. That illustrates it’s a bad mount, not that all the TomTom users are idiots, I’d say.

For two, I wrote them using the online support system asking about the issue.

I’ve just purchased the TomTom 910 and had it fall off the windshield twice even though it was connected properly. In addition, any bump, and it starts to slip. I understand many are having similar mount problems. What’s the status of shipping a better mount? I love my old TomTom, want to love the new one, but the mount problems are a serious issue and I may have to return the device

Within a day, I got this reply:

It would seem your mount is at fault and we will have another one sent to you.

And then after I submitted my address, I was told I’d be sent this:

TomTom GO 510/710/910 Mount incl. Docking Shoe (no POR) [L]

I don’t know if this means I’m getting an improved mount or just another one like I have already. I’ll do a follow up when it arrives — unfortunately, not in time for me to use on my upcoming trip.

My third trip was an hour drive up to the International Air Tattoo north of Swindon. By this point, I’d loaded up some music and was curious to see how that worked.

Touch the screen, and there’s a Music & Photos icon on the first menu that comes up. Select TomTom Jukebox, and you get another screen showing playlists, plus options for artists, albums, songs, genres or audiobooks. Even though you can’t move music over by artist or album, once in TomTom, it at least organizes them this way using your MP3 tags.

Pick your options, and the music starts playing out of the unit. It’s a bit tinny, but it’s workable and will be handy for those times when I’m in a rental car or something.

Actually, it’s better than that. I hooked up my FM transmitter that I use for my iPod to the unit’s external port. Boom — really good quality music was now flowing out of my car stereo. Even better, when navigational instructions come on, the music pauses, then picks up from where it left off.

I’m looking forward to trying things out more on my next trip. I even downloaded Bodie The Surfer Voice for free to get ready.

Until about a year ago, I looked with scorn upon satellite navigation. Who needs it? But then we got upgraded to a rental car in Germany once with it built in, and I was a believer. A believer so much that I decided I needed to have a system for myself.

I ended up going with TomTom for reasons I can’t now quite recall. I’m sure it wasn’t just because I thought the name was cool. I actually have two TomTom systems. I run Navigator 5 on my Dell Axim X50v, and later on I’ll talk more about that, getting a nice car mount for it and loving how it guides me to Google, Yahoo or wherever when I make a jump back to the US for work trips.

I went for the Pocket PC version because I though it made more sense. I’m a Pocket PC user (well, I guess Windows Mobile 5 now with the Dell upgrade), so why bother getting a standalone version?

Why bother? My wife. I wanted her to be able to use the system if needed at times, and I quickly realized the Pocket PC system wasn’t going to fly. Love, first you set up the Pocket PC mount. Now plug the charger into the lighter and run the cable to the mount’s power input. Now run this other cable over to the Bluetooth GPS unit. Turn that on. Wait a minute or two, then make sure it’s syncing with the Pocket PC. What? It’s not? Reboot the Pocket PC, then try to reestablish the partnership….

That just wasn’t going to happen. I can get through this minor hassles easily enough. But if technology gives my wife even the slightest problem, she bolts, and I get blamed. Sky+ (the UK version of TiVo) is great because it (usually) works to record all of her shows effortlessly. Buying that made me a genius. The automatic coffee machine for Christmas? Genius. The Windows Media Center PC in the kitchen? Now that it works properly and she’s got Sky on in there to catch the odd recorded episode of “I’m A Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here,” I’m a genius. I’m more a genius these days because years of being a failure has taught me to prescreen tech before I push it her way.

I got Navigator (3 at the time) last February and stuck with it because the new TomTom Go all-in-one units were coming but not fast enough to help me with some business trips to the US. But when they finally arrived, I made the plunge and got one of those as well.

I went for the top of the range, the TomTom 700. They used to have a nice comparison chart explaining the differences, but that’s gone away. Fortunately, Mike over at the great Pocket GPS World gives the rundown here: New range of TomTom GO hardware. In summary, it goes like this:

• TomTom Go 300: 200MHz processor and 32MB of memory. Detailed maps of the UK (or country you buy it in).
• TomTom Go 500: 400MHz processor, so faster than the 300, plus you get the major roads of Europe — allowing you to navigate if you go outside the UK. Can also let you do handsfree calling through your mobile.
• TomTom Go 700: Same as the 500, except you have a 2.5GB hard drive rather than running off a SD card, plus 64MB of memory. You get detailed maps of all of Europe and a remote control.

I never, ever use the remote control, so that shouldn’t incent you to dive into the 700, at least from my point of view. I was attracted by having everything on the hard drive, which was indeed handy for Germany. I had not only the detailed maps but also saved time in that I didn’t have to do the load, unload maps thing. The downside is having a hard drive makes me nervous that it will fail in three to five years. Sure, by then I’ll probably have moved to something else. But the solid state ones will keep going.

What about the 500 versus 300? The hands-free is very cool, when you live in a country where you can’t talk on the phone unless you use hands-free. I’ve had calls come in and can hear easily. Being heard is a little hard, but I could probably tweak that if I really used it much. I haven’t yet set up an address book, but that looks good. And in theory, I can even get text messages with my phone linked to it (a Windows Mobile 5 upgraded SPV C500). So if you’re doing some talking, that step up from the 300 probably makes sense.

There’s also a new TomTom One system out, cheaper than the 300. It’s smaller than the 300 but aside from that, looks just as capable if not better. I found a review of it here especially talking about it versus the Go, and honestly, if I were to do it again, I might have gone downscale for it. But it wasn’t offered when I made my plunge.

So how’s life with what I did go for? Generally good, with the caveat that I hardly use it. I’m not out and about that often. When I am, it’s usually a local trip to take the kids to football practice or shopping in nearby Salisbury. But we’ve done three major trips with the Go so far.

First, we had a weekend down near Weymouth. Ah, a nice British day out at the seaside, sitting in a tent and watching the rain come down. But the fish and chips were good!

Anyway, this was the first big outing. The new Gos have postcode navigation. Enter a postcode, and away you go. Unlike US ZIP codes, postcodes are very precise. They take you to an individual house.

The only problem was, TomTom didn’t have the exact postcode matching the hotel my wife gave me. So I went for one that was closest. It got us almost all the way there just fine with only two glitches. Once it wanted me to turn, but it made no sense. So I drove on, and that was the right thing to do. Another time, my onscreen icon suddenly jumped and had me out way off the road. About a quarter mile later, it jumped back.

The almost part was the last half mile. We ended up in a caravan park and no clue where to go next. And this lead to my wife being disgusted with the GPS and upset I didn’t just have a map. “But we’re pretty much there!,” I said. Then we had  a good laugh at how I’d gone from the typical male response of not asking directions to having something giving me directions, yet we still end up in a fight

Anyway, a little exploring down another road, and we found our way to the hotel. Once there, getting back to the place when we did little outings was easy. You can memorize the GPS position of any place you’re at, though it could be much easier.

Ideally, when I touch the screen, I want to see a big button right on the screen that says “Memorize GPS position.” That would be handy if you’re driving along, see a spot, store or whatever you want to recall later. Instead, you have to:

1. Touch the screen, choose Arrow to the next one
2. Choose Add Favorite
3. Choose Arrow to get past the initial screen that comes up
4. Then choose GPS position

We used the system quite a bit for little trips in the Weymouth area, and overall, I was pretty pleased. Once it took us back to the hotel in a way that seemed way too longish, but I didn’t know the area enough to be certain of this.

The next big trip with it was out to Wales from Wiltshire, to my mother in law’s house. No problem. It directed me along a route exactly as we would have gone without it. Indeed, we really didn’t need it, I just wanted to play. But it’s also nice because it gives you an ETA and the kids always love it saying at the end, “You have reached your destination.”

My third big trip was on Boxing Day, the day after Christmas. We went out to Stourhead, a beautiful National Trust property a short drive from our home. My wife’s been there several times but wasn’t certain exactly how to reach it from a friend’s house we went to before going on to Stourhead. So I had an excuse to take it, and I do like to play with gadgets.

Here, I had a major annoyance come up. When you want to go somewhere, you touch the screen and then select the Navigate To… button. That brings up another screen with these choices:

• Home (you can program this in, very handy)
• Favorite (a list of memorized destinations, also handy)
• Address
• Recent Destinations
• Point Of Interest
• Postcode
• Point On Map
• City Center
• Point Of Interest In City

We didn’t know the postcode of Stourhead, so that was out. And Stourhead isn’t a city, nor did we know the address, so we couldn’t use the Address or City Center options (though I tried).

Clearly, Stourhead is a Point Of Interest. So, I punched that in. Annoyingly, I couldn’t then type in a few letters to find it, in the way you can with addresses. Nope. You’ve got to first pick a type of POI. Well, was it a “Park & Recreation” POI or a “Tourist Attraction” one or what? More annoyingly, the POI option brings up POIs that are closest to you.

Now, that’s not a bad idea in some ways. You’re in a town, you need the nearest tourist office, so you hit POI then Tourist Information Office. The closest one comes first and then so on. But with the TomTom Go 700, since you have ALL OF EUROPE on the hard drive, you find things listed that aren’t even in Britain.

More to the point, what do you do to find a POI at a place you aren’t near but want to go to. That’s where POI In City comes in. Choose that, type in the city name using the touchscreen keyboard, and now you can get POIs near that area.

My wife remembered Stourhead was near the city of Mere, so I punched that in to get POIs nearby. Then thinking Stourhead must be under Park & Recreation, I tried that category. No dice. Nearest part was Hyde Park in London, 95 miles away. Fourth on the list were parks in Holland! Scenic/Panoramic View? Again, no dice.

I gave up, because the kids where now restless, as was my wife and mother in law. She figured she knew the way, so there was no sense in me playing more. I punched in Mere using the City Center option and off we went. But then as we drove, I talked her through checking the options again. Finally, doing POI In City for Mere, the Tourist Attraction category brought up Stourhead.

So in the end, we got the destination programmed. But ideally, I should have been able to just keyword search through the entire database without needing to pick a city, then pick a category. Did I miss something? Apparently not, as I’m not the only person with this gripe. A forum discussion here covers it, as well. I did some additional searching, but there doesn’t appear to be a solution. I will try a post to TomTom support and see if I get luck that way. It’s incredibly frustrating.

When we were about at Stourhead, we saw a turnoff marked by a National Trust sign. We took that, even though TomTom wanted us to keep going. I’m not sure if it was trying to route us to an alternative entrance or not and didn’t care to explore further. But it was another of those things that makes you lose a little bit of faith.

This all brings me to our trip to Germany. We headed out a few days before New Year’s, and this was a perfect test for my TomTom. No excuses needed to use it — it was going to be handy to get around, especially in that my sister-in-law’s family had moved to a new home.

We arrived at Munich airport, then got our rental car. I decided with the snow that it made sense to have a car with winter tires on it, so I paid the extra and ended up with sat nav included. So now I had TWO sat nav system. And you betcha, I switched them both on. I didn’t lug (it’s actually really lightweight) my TomTom over not to use it. But I couldn’t resist switching on the one in the car.

It was also kind of fun. I couldn’t switch the built-in system to speak in English but managed to figure out how to program the destination. So on the trip, I had both German and English instructions coming my way. A nice way to practice my German!

TomTom Go doesn’t have postcode navigation for Germany, but we had the street address, and that worked fine. We arrived at our destination without trouble.

The next day, we headed to the ski resort of Rottach-Egern. Specifically, we wanted to go to Wallberg cable car area to do some tobogganing. But the POI search thing came up again. Wallberg wasn’t listed as a tourist attraction near Rottach-Egern. It wasn’t under Park & Recreation. Scenic/Panoramic? Nicht! If Wallberg is a POI in TomTom, I have absolutely no way of finding it.

To be fair, the in car navigation didn’t have Wallberg either — though both GPS systems really should have listed such a prominent place. But since we were following my brother in law, we didn’t really need to get to the exact end destination. We could just follow him. We didn’t really need the GPS at all, since we were following him.

Well, we got separated in the last 20 miles or so, when we turned onto a busy road and we got stuck, unable to turn until traffic cleared more. When we got to Rottach-Egern, he’d already found parking at Wallberg full up. Instead, he thought we should get lunch and gave us the address of a restaurant, which was good, as we were starved.

“If TomTom gets us to this restaurant, I’ll love it forever,” my wife told me. The ultimate test had arrived. In went the address, 10 minutes later we were there. She loves TomTom completely now.

One thing I noticed above our car GPS was how cool it was knowing that there was a traffic problem along a particular route. My understanding is that radio stations broadcast this in a way that some GPS systems can tap into.

TomTom can’t do that. You can subscribe to a somewhat similar traffic service it offers, where going through the internet, it will bring back changes and set up alternative routes. The downside is you have to pay TomTom for the service, plus it depends on getting to the internet through your mobile phone — so you’ll have those charges, as well. Since I don’t drive much, it’s not something I’ve tried so far.

On the flip side, TomTom’s very good at coming up with alternative routes if you see trouble. Say you’re driving along and you hear a route is blocked ahead or you can see it. Hit Find Alternative and options to get new routes come up.

This was super handy for me when Chris Sherman and I were both heading off to a meeting at Google. We were in different hotels but not that far apart, and we drove separately as we had different places to go to afterward. About two miles from the exit, an accident had snarled traffic. I punched in for an alternative route and hit surface streets over, arriving with plenty of time. Chris sadly was stuck and came in about 15 minutes afterward. Chalk another one up for sat nav!

If you want to know more about TomTom Go, here are a couple of things to check out:

• TomTom GO 700 Review is a nice, long review with plenty of screenshots.
• My TomTom Go is a great site with support forums.
• TomTom Forum Links is a page at TomTom where they point at various third-party forum areas.
• Pocket GPS World is a great overall site but geared more I’d say toward TomTom Navigator users. However, they’ve got POI databases you can download for TomTom, plus what appears to be a great speed camera database.

I’m planning to play more with TomTom with a focus on two main things. I’d like to check out how well it works to find speed cameras, probably using the Pocket GPS World Safety Camera Database. I don’t actually want to speed and avoid the cameras. I just find it handy to help ensure I’m not accidentally going over the limit when near them.

I also want to play with having my kids voices giving me directions, rather than Jane, the British woman who’s voice I use. Haven’t read through it yet, but The Ultimate Guide to Creating Custom Tomtom Voice Files looks promising. Easy guide to putting your own voice commands on the TTG and Idiots guide to TomTom Voices. This software might be useful.

Postscript: I heard back from TomTom on the POI issue, and no luck there:

We are sorry to inform you, but we do not support this feature at the moment. We are always researching new features and developing them when necessary. Please check our website frequently on any news concerning new features, updates and upgrades.