Digital Trends

TomTom GO 920 T May 20th, 2008 | by Josh Norem

Use and Testing

Upon initially powering up, the GO 920 T ran us through a brief configuration wizard where we chose our language, time, directional voice and how we wanted it to look during the day. Next, it asked us if we wanted to set up our Home address, which is great since we’ve had difficulty configuring this on other GPS units. Otherwise, the device can be mounted either on the dash via a suction cup or on the dashboard.

The unit’s main menu lets you choose to navigate somewhere, change preferences or look for help in case you’ve been in a car accident and need a hospital or mechanic. It even has first aid instructions you can use in case you witness an accident or are in one yourself. Worth noting too: The navigation process lets you select an address, home, a favorite, various points of interest (POIs), “city centers” or a recent destination.

All told, we found the interface relatively intuitive, and we like that the GO 920 T lets you choose from places near you or in the city at large. We had to confirm our metropolitan area every time we chose the latter option, which was a little annoying, but we can see how it’d be useful in more widespread areas where you’re not always in the same vicinity. Also, we found the Points of Interest (POI) categories a bit lacking and confusing at times. For example, there’s no category for grocery store, but there are categories for ice skating rinks, yacht clubs and wineries.

Interestingly, TomTom further lets you delete POI categories, but for some reason the only ones you can remove are fire stations, playing fields and schools. You can add new POIs and POI categories though, which is cool, accomplished by entering a new category and then manually entering associated addresses. However, you can only enter an address and can’t give it a name such as “local market.” On the bright side, whenever a POI we were looking for didn’t show up automatically in a predefined category, we were able to quickly locate it by typing in its name every time.

One of the biggest features of the GO 920 T is its ability to let you simply say an address and have the unit recognize it, which is obviously preferable to tapping it in with your finger, especially while driving. Unfortunately, we couldn’t get these functions to work completely.

The company provides two options for this feature: spoken address, and spoken address with dialogue. The former requires you to say the city, and then tap with your finger the cities it brings up on the screen, which defeats the purpose of using vocalized commands in the first place.

The second option is similar, but instead of requiring you to tap the screen, it instead lists the results with numbers assigned to each one, then you just have to say “one” to select the first result. We had no trouble at all getting it to recognize the city and the street, but we were never able to get it to recognize street numbers. We’d say “two” and a two would appear. Then we’d say “four” and it would just sit there at two no matter what we did. We ended up having to type in the actual street number every time we used this feature, which – as you might imagine – proved highly disappointing.

This kitchen-sink GPS even includes a Bluetooth remote control.