Advanced Itinerary Planning

Trip planning is also extremely convenient with the GO 300, even if your journey requires something more complicated than just entering a direct destination. The GO lets you plan your route off-line with the Advanced Planning menu. If you need to plan a lengthy trip, the GO provides an Itinerary Planning menu that can be used to enter a list of destinations and waypoints. The difference between destinations and waypoints is that when you reach a destination item, the GO will interrupt the navigation by telling you that you have arrived there, whereas a waypoint is merely a notable location along the route that will not affect the navigation of the overall trip. If you have multiple destination points, you can continue the trip to the next destination by acknowledging the GO 300's prompt. The GO even lets you move items on your itinerary list up or down, and can show you a map view of each destination or waypoint. Itineraries can be saved to or loaded from the system, so you can, for example, plan a two-week vacation entirely in advance. We have not seen an itinerary feature in any of the other units.

The planning preferences can be set in the GO 300's preference section; the unit comes preconfigured to base every route on a select number of transportation criteria. When you want to alter these, you have a lot of options to choose from. You can plan the route to take the fastest or shortest way, to use preferred highways, to avoid of toll roads, or to use only bicycle paths. Pedestrians can plan walking routes (the GO 300 is the only highly rated in-car device GPS we've reviewed with this feature—and is also the only one small enough to carry around while walking). People with limited-speed vehicles, such as large campers, can plan routes by selecting a top speed to be used for the trip calculation.

Should you run into a snag along the way, the GO 300 offers one of the most advanced and easiest-to-use alternative routing systems. Not only can you avoid roadblocks based on their distance ahead of you, but you can also decide to travel past a specific location that you can enter as an ordinary address. In addition, you can choose to avoid parts of your route, simply by deselecting them with your finger in the list-based route view. If you make a mistake, the GO lets you return to your original route—a feature unique to the 300.

The TomTom GO 300 also lets you manage your favorite locations and points of interest. Most GPS systems these days have a very comprehensive list of POIs, but the GO 300 is one of the few units we've reviewed that lets users define their own categories (several Garmin models, including the 2720 and the i3, let you define custom POIs, but you have to use Garmin's categories). This is useful if you want to create a group of POIs for a specific trip or topic, such as hunting locations or your favorite beaches. We especially like the feature that provides an audible warning tone when you come close to a point of interest. You can determine at what distance the warning tone will sound and what tone to play. You can choose a different sound for all your custom categories from the included array of sounds.

Another innovative feature is the addition of Bluetooth capability. With it, the GO 300 can be paired with a select number of mobile phones from Cingular, AT&T, and Verizon to access weather and traffic information. Such traffic information can be used in the alternative route menu to recalculate your route automatically, based on traffic data received through the Bluetooth link. But this connectivity requires users to sign up for data plans with their cell-phone carriers, which could add more than $20 a month to your phone bill. (The service itself is free until the end of the year, but may require a charge in the future.) We were unable to acquire a compatible phone in time to test this feature, but stay tuned to PCMag.com for an update in the weeks ahead.

Overall, the TomTom GO 300 impressed us again. It includes many features that make it a breeze to plan your trip and get where you need to go. We'd like to see the folks at TomTom incorporate text-to-speech technology in its spoken route information (as we've seen in the Garmin 2720 and Magellan RoadMate 760), so that an instruction could sound more specific. For example, "In 500 yards, turn left on Main Street" would be better than the more general and sometimes confusing "In 500 yards, turn left." (In the case of multiple upcoming lefts, this general guidance can escalate quickly into a confusing quandary).

With its improvements, we think the GO 300 has kept pace with the market. It retains the GO line's position as one of the easiest to use in-car aftermarket GPS navigation systems.