TomTom's Go 920 T flagship navigator announced
By Thomas Ricker 
posted Aug 30th 2007 8:06AM
posted Aug 30th 2007 8:06AM
[Via Golem.de, thanks David R]
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Awesome!
I've been waiting for this upgrade for months!
Only 4GB storage is a concern though.
The device certainly looks slick, and functionality sounds better (should be given that it'll probably cost a second mortgage to buy it!). Big disappointment is that it looks like it still uses the same nasty blocky map graphics - curves are still a series of very obvious straight lines.
And how much is all this navigation goodness gonna cost?
Why only 400Mhz CPU?
Why do you care?
Because a new PDA mostly has a 500Mhz+ CPU!...
I'm disappointed too about the processor , 400Mhz more than enough for simple navigation, but in those "advanced" navigation devices it's barely sufficent.
Earlier experience with go910 proven that enabling his excellent vocal synt would take 30 sec or more time to calculate a route (and 2sec or more to the normal to reroute if took the wrong way)than using only the normal vocal guidance, not only the processor but the ram was taxed too : vocal synth voices taken about 47Mb of 64MB total ram.
Using the go910 in navigation mode with synt voice while playng mp3s taxes the unit so much if i take a wrong route it take 10 or more second to recalculate the route...
Well that is a nice replacement for the 910 (which I bought a couple months ago, and really like except for the size). The 4GB does leave room for concern. I don't put music or photos on mine, but still all those maps take up a lot of space. Maybe they have a better compression for the ...images(?).
“4GB of internal flash with SD expansion”
1 GB has been enough for the North American or European maps so 4 GB should be plenty for both along with plenty of extras like POIs, voices, graphics, etc.
For those wanting more storage (road music, recorded books, podcasts) SD cards are dropping price rapidly, currently online you can find $10/2GB & $30/4GB. By not building unnecessary memory into the units the price is at least slightly lower and can be cheaply upgraded in the future.
That said, me too, what sort of price are we talking? Refurb low-end TomToms are under $200, is this gonna be ~$400, ~$600, what?
Yea, I just picked up a 720 which looks to be the same but only has 2GB of flash.. I've dumped a ton of extra voice options for Finnish and Spanish and still have room to spare. Great GPS unit.
The press release states that the 920 is gonna be $599 and the 920T is $699. The "T" stands for traffic and includes a traffic receiver and one year subscription.
The new "Enhanced Positioning Technology" mentioned by TomTom in there promotional literature refers to "Dead Reckoning" technology by SiRF which using micro accellerometers can accurately maintain positioning accuracy when a GPS lock is lost eg. in a tunnel.
An awesome feature of the GO 920 and G0 920T is the Voice Prompted Address Entry allowing you to speak to the unit to enter the address you want to be directed to.
More information on the technology behind the GO 920 can be found at http://gpstekreviews.com/2007/11/12/tomtom-go-920-and-go-920t-premium-automotive-gps-navigators-review/
Wow - I like the Enhanced Positioning Technology feature. Now we'll be able to figure out how to get out of a tunnel once we enter it! :)
How about the Voice Prompted Address Entry - very handy feature. User just has to get used to talking to a device. Of course it's quite normal nowadays to see people doing what appears to be talking to themselves or to inanimiate objects. Just get used to it.
Tomtom uses teleatlas maps and not Navteq's which is the dissapointment factor of these GO 920's. Dead Reckoning is not needed on Garmin's nuvi 700 series, it locked signal even in a long stretch of tunnel. I've bought Nuvi 760 and compared it with my GO 910, navigation accuracy, POI's & streets database is much better on Nuvi 760.