Budget navigators are hitting the streets faster than we can review them, but there’s much to be said for expanding your budget and getting a fully loaded GPS—especially when the result is as good as the $499 TomTom Go 930. Voice commands, smarter routing, lane assistance, and Bluetooth are often overlooked or referred to as “extras.” The attractive Go 930 has all of these features, making this price a good value. In fact, the Go 930 feels like it should cost even more.
Design
The 4.7 x 3.3 x 1.0-inch Go 930 offers a 4.3-inch screen, an elegant black casing, and a thin profile. It comes with a compact window mount, which makes the whole package easy to stow away. TomTom mastered the easy interface long ago, and the large, colorful icons make using the Go 930 simple even for beginners.
The Go 930 Is All Ears
You don’t need to key in addresses, thanks to the addition of voice commands. To enter the voice-command area, you first select the navigation area, then choose to enter an address. You’ll see two voice options: one that lets you speak your address but tap confirmations on the screen, and a second that lets you speak confirmations as well. The voice system worked quite well in our testing, almost always hearing us perfectly. Road noise didn’t diminish its accuracy, but having the radio on did. That made it more accurate than the Magellan Maestro 4250’s voice system, which couldn’t handle any noise interference at all. While the Go 930’s voice recognition works well, its functionality is limited. We wish we could give commands such as “Mute volume” or “Find nearest Chinese restaurant,” but the Go 930 doesn’t have that capability. On the other hand, not having a small dictionary’s worth of preset commands to memorize simplifies this technology.
A Well-Rounded Feature Set
The Go 930 offers TomTom’s Map Share technology for correcting routes and downloading corrections from others. These features require using the included TomTom Home software, which has been greatly improved with the 2.0 version. However, the software doesn’t distinguish between user-generated corrections and those from TomTom.
Connecting the Go 930 to a Bluetooth phone is simple, and doing so lets you answer calls hands-free, place calls with just a tap, and quickly contact emergency services, if needed. The Go 930 also includes an FM transmitter (although a static-filled one), a media player, 5 million points of interest, and a remote control. The remote doesn’t clip onto the steering wheel, as those of other GPS devices do, so its value was lost on us.
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