8. A Couple Of Things Didn't Work

During my various navigations with the Go 700 I encountered two problems. The GPS didn't have current enough information about changes to a major highway in my area and its restaurant information didn't include a restaurant I needed to navigate to.

I live near Santa Monica and Westwood boulevards in West Los Angeles. Those who know LA know that Santa Monica Blvd. has been undergoing major widening construction at various places from Sepulveda Blvd. to the Beverly Hills border. Earlier the same street was widened to the East in the West Hollywood area. My own street is now blocked on Santa Monica Blvd. by a permanent island that prevents anyone from turning left or right from the highway onto my street. The Go 700 did not have this new information in its map database. However, in the GPS's favor, it did try tell me to turn left onto Sepulveda Blvd. to take an alternate more northerly route using Wilshire Blvd., which is about a mile before the turn into my street from Santa Monica Blvd. When I tried that on one of my trips, the Go 700 guided me home with no problems.

Recently I was out in Westlake Village, California at the TG Publishing offices. A bunch of us decided to go out for dinner to a restaurant called the "Claim Jumper." The restaurant was maybe a mile from the offices. So, I got in the car and started driving according the verbal instructions I'd been given. I was looking for a shopping center with a fountain in front. I found my the mall and turned in, but I couldn't find the restaurant. The Go 700 was turned on and talking to satellites so it knew where it was. Great! I touched my way to the Point of Interest menu, clicked it and the GPS immediately showed me all the restaurants it knew about in the area.

This part of the Westlake Village/Thousand Oaks area is so full of restaurants that I had to page through a very long list to validate that no Claim Jumper restaurant was listed within a mile or two. I found one 19 miles to the west, but that couldn't be it. Westlake Village and surrounds is a fairly new and developing area and I assume the restaurant was just too new to be listed.

As far as I have been able to determine, there is no way to get regularly updated map information. Also, it appears that points of interest information isn't updated for the standard set of points such as restaurants and hotels, but that updates are available for traffic cameras in Europe and the United Kingdom and for wireless hotspots, Baskin and Robins ice cream shops and Dunkin' Donuts stores. Some of the wireless hotspot information and information on the shops and stores is free. Traffic camera information is sold on a yearly subscription basis. Prices range from 40 Euros (about $48.50 USD at this writing) for a single country to 70 Euros (about $85 USD) for all of the UK.

In Part II of this review I'll talk about pairing the Go 700 with a Bluetooth phone and using some of the TomTom Plus services to get very current traffic and other information. That will give you a sense of one of the GPS's real strengths and let me show you directly how real-time updates are done.