Up until recently, nearly all of the GPS devices that we've tested and featured were just in touch screen.
The primary advantage was that they could be used while wearing gloves or with the stylus.
Nobody uses styli anymore and with the advent of the capacity touchscreen smart phone, nobody wears gloves either.
Lately, we've been seeing GPS manufacturers playing keep up with the Joneses by jumping to more responsive smart phone of capacity of touch screen with multi touch functionality
with the most recent being TomTom GO 2405 TM and GO 2505 TM models.
I'm Antuan Goodwin.
I've got my hand on a 2405, but take a first look.
Beyond the fact that it uses the basic touch screen on a suction cup form factor, the new TomTom Go model differs quite a bit from the previous TomTom model being tested.
The new glass capacity of touch screen is way shinier than the standard plastic screen.
Somewhat like a mirror when they powered.
The Go series foregoes TomTom easy for port
Instead using a separative suction cup cradle that grips to the 2405 metal rear panel with magnet rather than friction.
Going also is mini USB charging were replaced with a proprietary power cable that rolls in the unit FM receiver for traffic and can remain connected to the cradle when the 2405 is removed from the vehicle.
The Go 2405 features an updated interface that aside looking super sleek, also takes the advantage that capacity of touch screen functionality
You just pinch to zoom and put to scroll on the map or slide their way to multiple menu screens.
Regular tapping and touching is also extra responsive compared to what we are accustomed to.
The Go also features bluetooth connectivity for hand free calling with phone seen.
Free lifetime FM traffic update.
There's also your standard graphic lane guidance when navigating highways and takes the speech spoken street names and POI names.
The TomTom's speech engine mangles the occasional proper noun and you should hear it rather faint, San Francisco.
-San Francisco.
-but for the most part, the speech is fairly natural.
The Go unit also feature a fairly extensive voice commands system that allows users to do things such as call home or navigate to a favorite destination.
However, the only part of the voice command system that features any sort of on screen prompting is the address entry portion and without much guidance what to say, otherwise,
We found it easier just to use menus for the rest of the functionality.
On the bright side, the system usually understood what we are tying to say on the first shot.
-Nation street, Please state house number.
-2937
-2937
-Users are also given a good deal of flexibility over driving the map interface for the ability to change everything from color of the map to the position and information displayed on the status bar.
-There's also a new feature called make you own menu would give you this control over what shortcut button appear on the map screen.
Here we're using phone and voice command, this new interface even without its quirk, however.
For example, there are actually 2 map screens, the live driving map and browsing map where most GPS devices only have 1 map to serve both purposes.
While browsing map can be zoomed and scrolled and you can manually select destination,
that live map is only used for seeing where you're going, so despite the fact that it can be used to POI icon.
It doesn't look like you can actually select any destinations from this view.
It's a little confusion at first, but it kind of does have the advance of allowing user to simplify the driving hue for less distraction while still retaining the flexibility for browsing while stopped.
I think, we'll get used to it over time.
However, these are minor quarks on what shaping up to a very solid GPS navigator.
Certainly, one of the best that TomTom every released.
Check out the 4 view of the TomTom Go 2405 TM for the whole story and even more detail.
I'm Antuan Goodwin and this has been a first a look at the TomTom Go 2405 TM.
