TomTom Go 720

DO THE MATH BEFORE YOU BUY THIS REFURBISHED UNIT! I've a TT LE (2d Ed.), like it & decided to upgrade to the refurbed GO 720. The unit has great features and the price ($119) was OK. However, 'refurbed' to… me means 'like new' and the major problems are AMAZON does not tell you that it carries only a SIX MONTH factory warranty and that the map is at least 21 months old (on my unit). Cost to upgrade to the latest map from v.7 xx is $47 plus $48 for 4 quarterly updates. So, you're looking at another $95 or $215 for a 'refurb' with a 6 months warranty. AMAZON should have full disclosure on their listings so the customer can decide! Another poster said they should be ashamed. How true! I may return it because of this. By the way, Staples 'Black Friday' ad will have a brand new TT GO 830 for $169 with an extra coupon discount of 10% on a single item.

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The GPS unit is very nice, but the suction mounting method does not work. The friction mount listed with the GPS is incompatable with the GPS supplied suction mount. Another friction mount on Amazon… (TTGO-SPH-GAFM: Mini Friction Mount for TomTom GO 520/720/720, 530/730/930) does work quite nicely with this GPS. The internal memory holds the USA mapping features, but one should add a 2GB SD card to the unit for additional map storage and other uses detailed in the instruction book. Note the IB must be downloaded from the Internet, over 100 pages, but there are a lot of features on this GPS to learn about. It is in color, so make sure your printer has plenty of ink before you start printing. This unit supposedly works in Europe, there are several options for downloading European road maps at fairly reasonable prices. This is a Dutch company so they should know about European roads. You will need the 2 GB SD card for this, and you will have to download it to your computer and transfer it to the GPS unit. I haven't done that yet, but I expect to use it in Switzerland next year. The Swiss want a lot of money per day for use of a car equipped with GPS, so there is value here in bringing your own unit.

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If you want a GPS that has lots of features and you are willing to climb the learning curve...this is a good choice for you. The more I use it the more I like it. But it is like playing a musical… instrument, you must practice with it. I like the way it: talks to you (and the male computer voice Dave you can download is much better than Susan that comes on it), can fix in realtime a map error, can create and save a route with waypoints (I read that few others do this), you can give addresses to it with your voice, you can create favorites and new POIs, play music and GPS voice to FM radio (added 2 gig SD chip)music pauses for direction instructions, search POIs on route, updates route rapidly if you miss a turn. The map functions are really sophicisticated. You can easily search the map in 2d view with zoom functions and selected poi's and your own markers showing. Just for fun, in about 10 minutes I made a walking tour of monuments in DC and saved it as a route. If you are planning to go somewhere and you need to be there at a time, tell it and it will update you as to your ETA as you drive. It will also tell you what the speed limits are and warn you if you are speeding! If you are willing to pay extra it will track traffic and also gas prices. Plus it easily found my Palm phone and uploaded it's phonebook. It is an excellent hands free Bluetooth unit for the phone and easy to use. I really recommend this GPS. It is so much more than a GPS but is an excellent GPS as well. Oh and there is tons of addons to download at TomTOm Home. OH the referb comes with the 07 map. So I called TomTom Customer Support and complained about it being so old and they gave me the maps that are only one quarter old. Made me a happy camper. Only 12 bucks to get the most recent quarter. This unit is well worth the 119.00 price tag. OK one thing that Tomtom can improve, POI searching. There should be subgroups like for resturants, then subgroups like Italian, Mexican, BBQ, Burgers, etc.

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Amazon sent me three of these units and all three were malfunctioning. In all three cases I called TomTom and they confirmed the defect. The first responded to ghost touches in the upper right corner of… the screen. (You didn't have to actually touch it, it just thought it was being touched and responded to that.) If you keep pressing a spot in the upper right, the unit will eventually call the police. This is a rapid fire sequence of touches and very difficult to cancel. It called my local police 9 times before I could stop it. The second had a problem in which when you press a key on the onscreen keyboard it would actually select the letter above or to the right of the one you pressed. I posted a video of that. The third unit hard crashed every time I connected it to my computer. Only pressing the reset button with a paperclip would bring it back. It seemed to work correctly other than that. Overall I liked the operation of the Go 720, but Amazon got ripped off by the company that supposedly refurbished these units. They just repackaged them and sent them out again without sufficient testing.

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