TomTom GO 300 Car GPS Receiver

As the office expert on GPS technology, my boss asked me to test out his new Tom Tom GO 300 for him and let him know how to setup and use. This gave me a chance to evaluate it as well for a review here.

It is perfect for use in the car, especially for a beginner and/or for someone who is going to strictly use a GPS as a "road navigation system".

First off, while you can use it in more complex ways, it can essentially be a "set it and forget it" mechanism if you'd like. Once you've turned it on for the first time and setup who you'd like to be your voice (which not only adjusts for male vs. female, but languages and accents too, including Spain vs. Latin America for Spanish), all you really have to do when you begin a trip is turn it on, let it lock onto satellites/find your initial position, touch the screen, then touch "Navigate" and follow the directions to enter the address that you want to go to. It will search the shortest route, asking you if you wish to avoid toll roads. Then you're on your way.

The satellite reception is incredible. It never took more than 2 minutes to get a lock when I first turn it on, and even in the hallway of the first floor of a 7-story apartment building, after 10 minutes I had enough satellites locked (4) to get a position. And it never lost it's lock under a simple underpass like some cheap low-end handheld units do.

For car trips, I see only a few small flaws with it. The first is that I think it really finds the shortest route by distance, not time. When I had it navigate my commute home, this is what it did, but the shortest distance route is full of traffic lights as opposed to my slightly (1 mile out of 25) longer highway commute. But when I did my first deviation from the Tom Tom's suggested route, the recalculated route was the way I normally go. I like that if you screw up and get lost, it will find you back instantly.

Another flaw is the obvious age of the maps. The address of my office was changed in Nov. 2003 because of new 911 regulations, but the Tom Tom still shows it as the old address. You'd think in 3 years there would've been an update.

Finally, the US maps come on an SD card, and the Canada/Mexico maps on a CD and you can't easily mix and match them. If you lose or break the small SD card (as opposed to the larger CD), you lose the US maps. But I was able to easily back the maps up to my hard drive so I could just put them back on another SD card if this happens.

As a final note, this is a perfect and (compared to others in its class) inexpensive unit for the car, and while it is small enough to double as a handheld, the software is not really geared towards using it for activities like hiking or geocaching. You cannot easily enter waypoints as latitude/longitude, it is designed to really put in physical addresses. And the routing is also really geared towards going to something that is on a road, not some random spot in the woods. There doesn't appear to be any real good "tracking" capabilities either. But I realize this is really supposed to be a car navigation system and it definitely earns its keep there, there are lots and lots of other GPS's out there for "off road" use. And it will work for finding your way "off road" if you really need to.

All in all, I really enjoyed using it.