It'll take you there

I am new to satellite navigation. My primary motivation for buying such an accessory is leisure road trips. None of my 4 cars has satellite navigation (was not a customary option or simply not available at all when I bought them). Regardless, I would scrutinize the pros and cons of taking OEM options which attached to the car you buy and a lot more expensive that

I selected the Tom Tom Go because of:
1) the brand, which is gaining recognition fast
2) the rave previews I could find on the web
I selected the Go 700 because I wanted the most detailed maps and the bluetooth interface.

The out-of-box experience was quite good. Good quickstart guide, coupled with useful on screen tutorials. Basic set-up and simple "Navigate to" tasks were quite easy.
Installation in a car is simple, the supplied suction cup stand can be adjusted easily and holds well to flat surfaces. Consider that the curvature of certain windscreen locations makes it impossible to establish vacuum. I nonetheless managed to find locations which provided a good viewing angle without altering the view on the road. This makes the supplied remote very useful as the best viewing location of the Go 700 in your car may not be at arm's length. When I had to navigate menus while driving, it was also easier to maintain focus on the road while using the remote instead of using the touch screen.
The only criticism I would have about the stand is that it does not fully prevent the unit to vibrate. The latch mechanism is easy to use and sturdy.

Initial usage has a certain wow factor, the level of detail is quite accurate and the "perspective" view much more usable than the bird's eye view I've seen on Audi or Mercedes satnav systems.

Pairing a cell phone using Bluetooth is easy enough, but Bluetooth support is not perfect. As usual with Bluetooth, it is difficult to pinpoint the culprit since the problem could reside on either device, in my case a Nokia 6670 series 60 smartphone and the Go 700. I experienced a few cases where reconnection to the phone when getting back to the car would not work automatically and would require user intervention on the Go 700. The connection message is a brief insert a the top right of the screen, but the Go 700 will display an icon with a phone and a ? if the expected connection with your cell phone could not be restored.
A more annoying problem is that text message (SMS) reception does not work with Nokia phones. This is a common problem in the industry which is Nokia's fault (non-standard bluetooth profile support), but which could have been circumvented if Tom Tom had partnered with Nokia to support their proprietary interface. Bottom line: with a Nokia cell phone ...
- you can send compose and send text messages
- you can receive and place calls
- you cannot display received text messages
The handsfree system does work, but the sound quality on both ends depends a lot of the location of the Go 700 relatively to you, and the ambient noise of course.

Programming itineraries with multiple destinations and waypoints was fairly simple, but these are tasks I'd rather do on my PC while preparing my trip, rather than on the Go's touchscreen. The very limited PC support (back-up functions, that's it) falls short of my expectations for a flagship model. The USB interface and the supplied drivers allow to connect the Go 700 as a storage device, but there is no supplied application allowing to plan your route with all the convenience a PC user interface brings. I want more than simple back-up, and can think of effective solutions which would allow to retain the planning intelligence in the Go, yet manage and program the device from a PC application.

Navigation performance was quite good overall, but not perfect.
Obviously, this heavily depends on the accuracy of the stored map in the locations you travel through/to.
In my case, the level of detail available was extremely good in most places, but a recent (completed mid 2004) yet major freeway was missing.
The Go 700 has a certain threshold to guess that you had to take a different route, quit telling you to U-turn, and recompute a new route. However, I had an instance where it did recompute the route while there was no reason to. It is annoying to review carefully the planned route, only to find out that the Go then changed its mind and is taking you through a different path. I would want to be prompted to approve such route changes, but found no such setting.

I also had an instance where the Go 700 did get lost in the center of a mid-size city and missed a highway entry while it was straight ahead, and sent me instead circling around in suburbs. Eventually fell back on its feet after a long and useless detour, but it is annoying to learn that you may have to second guess the indications. The resulting irony is that I would not consider any long trip without good old paper maps, and study my itinerary to have a clue where I am supposed to go.

While on gripes, it is also annoying that all distances on highway exits are not as indicated by road signs. The Go reports the distance to the actual exit point, while road signs indicate the start of the exit lane. The 700 also sometimes announces a bend (not a direction change) unexpectedly, and uselessly. Some indications tend to come a bit late, keeping an eye on the display is the only way to really ensure that you won't miss a turn.

The spoken instructions are clear though comical at times ("take the exit then take the exit"), and the graphical description useful to understand in one glance the configuration of the place and where you need to go. A powerful combination.

Overall and without references for comparison, the Go 700 is a solid though imperfect performer for its core tasks, but a few more goodies would make the overall usage experience more productive and rewarding.