TomTom Go 720

Slightly too late picking up from the airport, ended up driving instead of on a bus, which would have been far easier. Hertz is a place that processes many buses of people from LAX and has no parking for cars, so you might as well get there on a bus.

I took the old GPS with me, but after a rather unimpressive lunch at WholeFood's Asian Express we went to Best Buy and then Fry's . Turns out that BestBuy has some pretty good pricing on GPSs and Fry's now has a 15% restocking fee, which makes it much less interesting to buy a GPS from them, but we did, we now have a TomTom Go 720 to play with $399 before taxes.

Much nicer then the $1200 old Magellan. It now has a battery, you can use it on its own. The 3D maps look sharp. Got to say that not updating the maps on the old one was probably the right idea, not that I wouldn't take them for free if offered, but another $99 for maps on that old unit is a bit of an insult. This is far worst then the iPhone price drop to screw the early adopter.

It seems that when I updated the software I lost many features were there originally. It seems strange. I might want to try installing the CD software again, after all it was feature rich, with the update, I don't see many things that were there before. I didn't get a chance to play with the original PC software, darn. One feature that I really need is moving addresses from the computer to the GPS. Seems like I should be able to cut and paste an address from an email to the TomTom.

Ev posted this article about Gizmo to UUASC, thought it was worth keeping the link.