I recently started a new contract which requires me to travel down to London from Bedford during rush hour. For this reason, I thought it would be prudent to upgrade my old TomTom One to a new TomTom GO 550 Live.

I originally bought a TomTom One (V1) back in 2006 at a cost of £215 because my then girlfriend was pretty bad at map reading. The TomTom then was an excellent purchase that removed the possibility of many arguments. The feature list of the new TomTom GO 550 Live tempted me to buy a new one, four years on. This was purchased with a third-party dashboard bean bag mount from handtec for a little under £190. Let’s see what new features it has, over a TomTom One:

• HD Traffic
• Speed Cameras
• Fuel Prices
• Google Local Search
• Weather
• IQ Routes Technology
• 4.3″ Screen
• Hands-free phone support
• Voice command and control
• Advanced Lane Guidance
• Text-to-speech

Features

The first five features in the list above require a subscription to TomTom Live services at a cost of £99 annually. These services are currently provided for a year, free of charge with a new purchase of the TomTom GO 550 Live. The next few updates are improvements of the hardware and software. But are they useful?

A larger screen is always welcome.

Hands-free phone support? I don’t generally make or take calls in the car, so this feature isn’t useful for me.

Voice control again, isn’t too useful for me – it involves learning what commands are available and it’s much easier just to navigate the menus with a tap.

Text-to-speech is a good feature – rather than pre-recorded navigation the TomTom can now read out road names which, when you’re following lane guidance can be very helpful.

Because the “Advanced Lane Guidance” feature of this new TomTom is awful. It’s excellent at telling you what lane to be in, when it’s already very obvious. Think of a motorway with giant blue signs telling you which lane is which. The thing that would have made this really helpful, and you’d be forgiven for thinking this was part of lane guidance, would be telling you what lane to be in when you’re in a large town on a road with three lanes, each of them going somewhere else and because it’s rush-hour lane changing is near impossible. Imagine my disappointment when I twice ended up going the wrong way, because I was in the wrong lane. Thanks TomTom. The included lane guidance isn’t always perfect either – Joining the M1 southbound at Junction 10 from Luton it will tell you to “Keep right, then go left on the roundabout, first exit”. But, if you keep right you cannot go left on the roundabout. Again, thanks TomTom.

IQ routes is essentially a dumbed down version of the Traffic service. The TomTom can assume for you, fairly accurately how much longer it will take to traverse a road at a given time on a given day – it knows a journey will take longer during rush hour. No complaints here.

Which leads us to the paid features, which to be fair are currently free for a year with the new TomTom.

Weather. Do I care? Not really – my iPhone has a much better app for telling me what the weather is going to be. But that’s not to say you won’t find it useful.

Google Local Search – again, for me not that useful. Generally, I already know where I want to go, and if I’m looking for somewhere specific I’ll probably check my iPhone first – because it’s a lot faster and more powerful than this TomTom unit. (Would you believe, four years on the GO 550 Live is only 20MHz faster than the original One? Although mapping features aren’t impossibly slow, they’re still slow. It would have been nice to have had a faster processor here).

Fuel Prices. This could be helpful if there are large price differences in your area, but passing several petrol stations listed the prices were all out of date, some by several pence. Not a feature to rely on then.

Speed Cameras are a nuisance. Most people believe this. Sure, I’d like to believe we’re all driving at the speed limit and, excluding country roads, towns along country roads and motorways, from what I’ve seen most people generally keep to it. But that doesn’t stop you seeing a speed camera and then furiously checking your speedo to make sure you’re not going to set the damn thing off. This distraction could potentially be more dangerous than not having a speed camera at all. So, is this feature helpful? Yes and no. Yes, because it clearly points out where the speed cameras are. No, because apart from being blindingly obvious (they’re large yellow boxes for goodness sake) you won’t set them off if you’re not speeding, which you shouldn’t be. But I guess it’s nice to be reminded that they’re there and if you do happen to be speeding, to slow down. I’d be interested to see the statistics for minor collisions at speed camera sites, where cautious drivers brake a little too much and the person behind, busily checking their speedo to make sure they’re not going to fast, shunts them in that time.

HD Traffic, a feature which could potentially be SO useful. The question comes though, is it? Well that depends. On largely busy routes with lots of people who potentially have TomTom’s connected to the service then probably. But, with smaller or less popular roads where reporting is often very delayed and the quantity of drivers with TomTom’s is far less, probably not. HD Traffic of course works from aggregated data from lots of other TomTom users. This means it won’t save you if you’re the first to get stuck in a traffic jam. At rush-hour, when traffic is very changeable I’ve found the reporting to be a little inconsistent. Do you leave your route to potentially save 15 minutes, or do you stay on because the jam the TomTom shows seems to have cleared? In the end, this feature is probably best for larger delays.

Adding to this, I had a problem with HD Traffic when I first used the device. Planning a route and asking the TomTom to minimise delays it would always say that a subscription was required and it may have expired, even though the information page clearly showed I had a years worth of free access left. An email sent to TomTom support on Tuesday the 27th about the issue remains unanswered today, five days later. I did however realise that by using the TomTom HOME software to access the TomTom that the service did actually work – and stayed working when I disconnected the cable until I powered the unit off. The service has started working on its own now however, several days after first turning the TomTom on. Which didn’t help on my way home for the first couple of days.

Now, you’d have hoped the quality of the maps may be slightly better. But there’s one roundabout on the A6 that’s been there for at least two years and it still isn’t on the map. When TomTom release new maps every quarter don’t think for one minute that those updates are for the most up to date road information because clearly, they’re not. I will say that average speed cameras placed on the M1 and A421 have been marked which is great. That said, even IQ Routes doesn’t seem to factor in the speed restriction and extra traffic because of this – clearly a frustrating thing when you’re trying to sell a device based on its traffic avoiding route planning.

Summary

Perhaps I’ve been spoilt. With an iPhone which is so fast and fluid, but the touch screen on the GO 550 Live is the same touch screen used four years earlier on the One. It works, but it’s slow and cumbersome. Given very similar technical specs of the original One and the GO 550 Live the only thing that could really sell the GO 550 Live are its new features – for me the only important ones were Advanced Lane Guidance and HD Traffic. Unfortunately, one of them falls well below expectation and the other is satisfactory at best. Was it worth updating from my four year old One? Probably not. A faster processor, better touch screen and full lane guidance within towns could have made this a definite yes.

If you’re wondering that the difference between the GO 550, 750 and 950 is, it’s a simple one: the 750 has more internal memory and maps of Europe, the 950 has some more internal memory and maps of America. If you’re not planning on shipping your car to these places to drive around you’re better off saving £20 and £70 respectively and going for the 550. Though, you may just be better off finding an original TomTom One on ebay and using that. Other versions of the One all use a slower processor which will no doubt make your mapping experience more frustrating than it already is.