In fact we needn't have worried as nothing turned up! Alongside the radical new units, the radical new PR company seemed incapable of organising a sample, so after much begging and gadget swapping we managed to source the range topper a TomTom Go 910 from someone's brother for the weekend. Sadly therefore we missed the packaging and most of the extras in the box, but we did get the main unit, mounting kit and a little pouch!

The first obvious signs of changes come in the form of the new mounting system, gone is the sucker and lever system from the old TomTom Go and instead we get a twist suction mount similar to that found on the TomTom One. However the Go version is more robust and like all TomTom mounts it feels like you could remove the windscreen using it! The mount also sports more connections including a 12 volt, TTG connector for TMC and an Audio out / In connector for microphone and external speakers.

TomTom have also spruced up the unit itself, with all TomTom Go models getting anew brighter 4" wide screen, this makes the unit look much larger but in fact it is slimmer than the outgoing model and despite its extra width. The basic styling remains the same but somehow the whole thing looks a tad sexier and less bulbous that the old Go 700.

With a simple but firm double click we soon had the Go 910 in place in our test car, power as before is supplied from a 12 volt socket and the GPS antenna is built into the rear of the unit with a connector to enable an external antenna to be fitted. The mount allows easy adjustment to obtain the best angle for your driving position and the screen seems to be mostly immune from glare although some strong sunlight did make for tricky viewing on occasion.

Power up and that first Time To Fix is around 1 and a half minutes which was pretty good, subsequent power up's gained lock in around 20 seconds which is a lot faster than we could get out of the car park. This is the first sign of the new SiRF Star III-chipset which is appearing in all new SatNav systems and you really shouldn't be buying an new system that does not have it as standard. We'll see just why later on in the review.

The TomTom Go 910 Navigation system has a whopping 20gb hard drive within its case, of which some 12.5gb is still available after all of Europe and the USA's street level maps are crammed in, plus a whole load of extras like voices and POI's. The menu system at first appears very simple and we started to wonder where all the settings were or if we'd been given the 510 model? It turns out TomTom have set each unit to start with minimal menus, the ones we'd need to navigate but not much more and you have to enable each menu or to "enable all menus" which we quickly christened geek mode!

After some 30 minutes of playing around with colours, voices and other on screen options like a compass and keyboard layouts people across the road were starting to stare thinking we were about to nick the shiny Mercedes. So time to plot a route using the full gamut of options, including navigate to address, postcode, city, part postcode, and POI. Our test route used on all navigation units was set in and seemed to take while to calculate but it had chosen what we have now agreed is the best route, so time to test out its directing capabilities.

We'd chosen to have Kate guide us, it's not often we let a woman read the map but we have every confidence in the TomTom ladies and this one is a bit special as she's the first from the Dutch company to do text to speech. Gone are the dull "at the end of the road, turn left" commands and in comes actual road names. Turn left onto London Road, much nicer and less need to look at the screen, which given today's busy roads is a bonus. We did find the speech to be a bit fast on occasion but as before commands are repeated as you approach the turn.

Time to upset Kate and take a few wrong turns, despite going right round a roundabout and back on ourselves and even leaving the motorway one junction early, the unit keeps its cool and guides us onto our destination without resorting to U turns or sulking. So the Navigation part of the TomTom Go 910 is pretty sound. However we did note that the recalculation of the route is much slower, possibly causing you to miss your turn on the re plotted route.

Some investigations into this unveiled an interesting answer, the Go 910 has the same processor as our daily unit the older Go 500 and the 64mb of memory should be enough to make speedy calculations, but the new text to speech features seem to eat this memory leaving only a few megs available for route calculation. We repeated the same route calc with the non text to speech voice on and shave some 12 seconds of the calculation time! It is a bit of a shock that TomTom would let the new feature encroach on the core function of the navigation. During all of our journeys the new chipset enabled a much higher degree of accuracy and managed to maintain satellite lock even amongst the taller buildings of central London, plus it seems to cope with those heat reflective windscreens too.

TomTom make a big deal out of their mobile features, whereby a Bluetooth connection allows a whole host of data services to be used with the unit. But the reason most of us consider the TomTom with Bluetooth option is as a hands free kit. Our experience of the TomTom Go 500 was a very poor one with callers complaining they couldn't hear us at all and the Go 910 is better but still relies on a microphone built into the cradle which seems to struggle in a car with any background noise. It's almost as if Tom Tom know this as they include an external microphone with the 910 which can clip onto a lapel and makes the hands free almost useful, however it's just like having a cabled hands free kit and rather ruins the idea for us.

This is a real shame as the integration with the phone is getting better and better with more phones able to show the contacts list, send an receive SMS on the Go910 (of course not while driving) and then use data services like TomTom traffic. The TTS or text to speech feature does also show up in other areas, like reading SMS messages sent toy your phone, possibly more of a gimmick than useable feature but novel.

TomTom have perhaps gone a little too far in hunting for extras, we were perfectly happy with the POI speed camera (sorry safety zone) map, which tells us of impending yellow government cash registers (sorry cameras). However tomtom think we need an MP3 player and even iPod control, yes you can use the 12.5gb of hard disk to store MP3 tracks and then use TomTom jukebox to play them back. Sadly the inbuilt speaker may be fine for navigation commands but for the Zutons it sucks. We couldn't test the iPod control but given that it needs a cable to snake across the dash to your Apple iPod it sounds a bit messy.

Lastly a tempting glimpse at two features we were not able to test, TMC and the buddies extra. TMC or traffic messaging channel has been available on numerous systems but never on the Tom Tom unit, this takes freely broadcast traffic news (on an RDS FM channel) and displays it on your screen. This data is for information only and is not normally machine readable and therefore requires you to react and ask the unit to plot a route around a road block (something the Go does very well). The TMC antenna is not yet available but is due for release in Q3.

The buddies service is on of the tomtom plus extras and possibly one of the most eye catching, here you can upload your current location via the TomTom server and this info can be downloaded by your friends or "buddies". You can then see them on the map in real time and even navigate to them or send the SMS messages.

Priced at £500 you are paying for all these extras and the European / USA maps plus all the extras, but the TomTom Go 910 is a complete package which seems to contain everything we liked about the Go range and now the few extras we liked from other systems. Text to speech is a welcome addition as is the new larger screen, MP3 playback and the hands free kit we could live without but some of the new Plus service look like the innovation that personal SatNav is going to demand in the coming year.

Sure the Go 910 is priced at a premium, but you are an early adopter aren't you?

Published - 18/06/2006

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