Motorola Motonav TN555 4.3-Inch Widescreen Bluetooth Portable GPS Navigator

June 14, 2010 by admin
Filed under Motorola GPS

Product Description

Product Details

4.3 Display
2 Watt Hands-free speakerphone with noise cancellation technology
Multiview display options
3 months free MotoExtras service package (Google Search, Weather, Fuel Prices, Flight Status)
Voice Recognition

Customer Reviews

Excellent! Saved me during a recent road trip!

Review Date: May 26, 2010

Reviewer: Tate,

I'll admit, I'm a child of the technology wave. I can read a map, but my goodness is it complicated, especially if you're driving alone. GPS's are a MUST for anyone young and old, so if you're wondering whether or not to get your first, let me assure you they are worth every penny. Is this Motorola Motonav the one for you? Let me explain why it should be.

This is my first GPS to try for myself, but I've been envious of my friends and family's GPS's for several months now, so I have some knowledge when comparing it to others from Tom Tom and Garmin. Though I didn't first handedly play with these other brands, I could tell and my friends tended to agree this Motorola is more complicated than most, but I think that's because it also does more.

Just last week, though, I drove a 700+ mile road trip to the Grand Canyon with stops in Phoenix and Albuquerque and several other large cities where I did a lot of town driving and not just interstate. The Motorola got me everywhere, and while I found it a little complicated to play with at first, I was instantly figuring out what all it can do.

With a touch of a button or two I found myself constantly using these features:

-Find businesses of note (food, fuel, lodging, etc)
-View turn-by-turn procedures in advance of the speaker telling you
-Elevation
-Aerial Views
-Exit Signs (shows which lanes go to which exits on popular city interstates)
-Speed Limit (shows what the speed limit is - I found this only popped up on interstates though)
-Text completion*
*this was awesome! My Tom Tom user friend was so jealous that with his model he had to type in the complete address before it would set to go. With my Motorola I could type something like "555 Ced" and it would suggest "555 Cedar Lane" or whatever it happened to be. This was really helpful if I wanted a Wal-Mart or something, just type "Wal" and it would suggest it really fast.

What I didn't use, but looks awesome

- Blue Tooth Functions

My cell phone doesn't have Blue Tooth (I know, I'm a stone ager!) but I ran across a lot of functions that that looked really awesome if I had set that up!

There was also some kind of subscription I could sign up for that offered a bunch of crazy extras like the ability to warn you if the stop light has one of those sensors that send you a ticket if you run it. I didn't really see a need for that, but they also had traffic functions and weather functions that looked like they might be worth subscribing for.

--
Overall opinion - if you are looking for your first GPS, you might want to seek out something cheaper and more basic, but the truth is after a trip or two you're going to wish you had some fancier features. This Motorola isn't complicated, it just offers a lot, and there is a getting-used-to stage where you are going to need to sort through which functions are beneficial to you and which ones are fluff. The first 100-200 miles of my trip I didn't think I'd ever look at the aerial map or elevation level, but as I started traveling up winding mountains I found it extremely beneficial to see how severe upcoming curves were and seeing the difference in elevation. There are probably several other functions I'll start using next that I'm not familiar with right now, getting a Blue Tooth cell phone is definitely on my list because voice activated commands sounds like something that would be amazing, especially when driving alone when you don't have time to be pressing buttons to get the information you need.

Other things I liked were the size of the screen (very readable), the voices (very clear and easy to understand), and keyboard (large buttons, very rare to accidentally press wrong letter). Overall I really really liked this product, and I'm sure you would, too!

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