9. At The End Of The Day

In spite of my disappointment with the TomTom Plus services, I decided to buy a Go 700. First, harking back to Part I of this story, I remembered how nicely the Go 700 performed as a GPS. Its hallmarks are accuracy, easy to setup routing, easy to understand human voices with sufficient volume to be heard above the loudest traffic, a nice look and feel and quick recovery after Barry-The-Wanderer takes a wrong turn.

Second I remembered how I'd been shamed that day out in Westlake Village, California when I got lost and my wife threw the worst of the worst eye daggers at me. Overall my wife's a good kid. I want to stay married to her and the Go 700 seemed like it might help me get through problems associated with my testosterone driven aversion to asking for directions. The wife's a bit jealous of Lori, the voice of TomTom I use for verbal directions, but sometimes when she's in the car I turn on Richard the forceful American English speaking provider of directions or Ken whose Australian accented English makes her melt into a little puddle of pudding.

How about some of the problems I found back in the first part of this story? I've gotten a little more used to the windshield mounting bracket and can mount and dismount the Go 700 much more quickly and accurately than back in the days of Part I. Then there's that slippery case. Well, the bad news is that the case is so slippery that I accidentally dropped the Go 700 from about three feet onto the very hard tiles in our entry hall. The good news is that except for the front bezel coming loose, the Go 700 is still working fine. The case is in fine condition; no dings or scratches and the bezel popped right back on without the slightest problem. After the "grand drop" as we call it at the Gerber's, I carry the GPS in its case almost all the time. Yea, I know, I'll probably drop it again when it's not in its case.

The last serious problem lies in not being able to update things like maps and points of interest. I had hoped that system upgrades would include new maps. Nope. A few days ago I upgraded the Go 700 system software a couple of notches. The North American map data, which is a part of the system, were still dated September 15, 2005. I'm not happy with this state of affairs and as I mentioned earlier, I keep urging TomTom and other GPS vendors to take map updates more seriously. But I also realize that electronics have limited lives. By the time the current maps are really useless, I expect I'll have purchased at least two more GPSes.

In fact, I already have my eye on the next GPS technology. You see in Europe most traffic information is delivered to GPSes over a special segment of the FM radio band. It saves the phone-GPS pairing and leaves your phone free for things like calls and simple PDA functionality. I expect to be looking at one or two of these soon. I'll let you know as soon as I do how they work.

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