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TomTom GO 540 Satellite Navigation System - LIVE UK & ROI List Price: Sale Price: £164.99 You save: £85.00 (34%)  Eligible for free shipping!Average Rating:   |
Features
- TomTom LIVE Services - HD Traffic, Safety Camera Alerts, Real Time Fuel Prices, Local Search with Google, TomTom Weather, TomTom QuickGPSfix
- Voice Command & Control
- Hands-free Calling
- IQ Routes, the smartest route any time of the day
- Advanced Lane Guidance, for navigating difficult junctions
- Active Dock
- Maps of UK & ROI
Reviews
tomtom go 540 live
by M. Bedi from Birmingham, UK on 2008-11-07
TomTom GO 540 LIVE UK & ROI
purchased this unit from another website. mine came with a tomtom promotional £30 fuel voucher. i think this should be the case with most of the first lot of 540's. check before buying in any case!
this unit is slimmer than a 520 that i had briefly a couple of months ago.
main changes i can notice are the overall UI icons have changed...which doesnt really bother me too much. the IQ routes service is pretty good, it does take you to places via different routes depending on day and time of day which is pretty handy. the lane assist feature is good too if you have trouble getting into the correct lane at motorway junctions and the like. all 3 of these features are available on the 530 i believe.
one major addition to this unit is the addition of LIVE services. on previous units if u wanted weather or traffic services you would have to allow the unit to use the GPRS connection on your mobile phone via bluetooth. however now, the unit has a sim in it already so it can connect to the server itself and access weather and traffic information. the traffic information is also the new traffic HD service which is meant to be much more accurate and up to date than previous sources such as TMC etc etc. i have found this to be true, it is more accurate than the traffic i used to receive via GPRS on the 520 unit i had. note that these LIVE services are free for 3 months i think, after that there is a £7.99 MONTHLY charge.
the google search feature is also useful. you can be anywhere and just use the unit to search using google to find anything eg restaurants. then the unit will direct you to that place!
the change that i am most thankful for is the new windscreen dock. to stick it to the windscreen, you dont just slap it on the windscreen. there is a rubber bezel that you must twist, this then causes the suction cup to stick very well to the windscreen (or dashboard). the cigarette power cable then connects to the dock rather than the unit. i used to find the old docks fairly flimsy and it was always difficult to take the unit and the dock apart and put them back together with any kind of haste. with the 540 it is very simple to attach/detach the gps unit from the dock. the unit actually clicks into place so it feels a lot sturdier.
having a few problems getting the tomtom home software to run properly with my mac (10.5.5). it is unable to recognise some of the files that it downloads in order to update the unit and hence cant unzip them. so mac users be careful!
also note that it is only the 940 that now has an FM transmitter. this unit DOES NOT have an fm transmitter.
overall i think it is a very good unit. havent really got any major complaints about it (other than the mac problem). i am really pleased with the new dock and the fact that it doesnt need my phone to get the traffic info so i think it is worth the extra £'s!
TomTom Go Live - the ultimate Sat Nav
by C. Alexander from Nottingham on 2008-11-15
I held back from buying the new GO LIVE sat nav from TomTom thinking it might be full of gimmicks, but now I have one I am SO pleased. I travel a lot with my job, and it made an immediate difference to how I drive and plan my journeys. I bought the 540 version.
Local Search with Google: this is truly awesome and almost makes the previous POI redundant. It enables you to find just about any named place you want to go, local, or in any town or city. Just type in the name (Sainsbury,Odeon,Fitness First,Waterstones,anywhere) and lists appear showing location, address and contact no's so you can pick one and let TomTom take you there. It's truly fantastic.
HD Traffic. This has to be the best yet. It informs you of realtime traffic delays and enables you to decide whether you want to wait in a queue or take a different route. A 5 minute delay might be better than a 20 minute re-route so you might decide to stay in the queue. A 20 minute re-route might be better than a 1 hour queue, so you might choose to avoid the delay. It's not about 'never' sitting in traffic, it's about making your own decisions with the information presented to you. Very clever!
Fuel Prices: Excellent, with lots of choices and real pricing and of course TomTom will take you to the station of your choice.
IQ Routes: Made a noticeable difference to my journeys when compared to my basic TomTom model. This can only get better as TomTom collate more and more journeys each day to give you better routes from A to B.
Cameras: It's good to know that Road Angel are involved now giving information on portable speed cameras. MapShare allows you to update this information if you find one while you are driving and warn others in a matter of minutes.
In conclusion, the GO LIVE is truly impressive, leaving other brands like Garmin and Navman way behind and in the doldrums. Don't hold back..GO GET!
TomTom Go 540 LIVE works a treat for me...
by Ozvaldinho from UK on 2008-12-09
We bought a Tomtom Go 540 LIVE for our sales vans. We already have various TomToms which are getting old and out of date. Our vans cover 1000+ miles per week each, all over the UK, so we wanted to try one of these to see if it is worth rolling out across our fleet.
So far, it's been a very positive experience. On my first day with it, it diverted me down a narrow country road, normally I wouldn't have trusted a TomTom's judgement on this, but decided to give it the benefit of the doubt.
It had picked up on a traffic jam which hadn't even been announced on the local radio and diverted me via some very scenic backroads which I would never have found on my own, even with an atlas. A couple of times I crossed under motorway and saw the queue I'd avoided.
The IQ routes sent me into Central London and plotted me a very efficient route into Covent Garden, and the reception was good in places where the older models just freeze up because of the tall buildings.
The Hands-Free bluetooth phone works much better than the 520, you can keep up a conversation at motorway speeds in our very noisy vans. On a 520, the mic just didn't pick up voices clearly because of the road noise. The unit connected very quickly with my Samsung J600 and a colleague's old Ericsson k510i. The only downside is that it doesn't download the numbers from the both SIM card and the Phone memory, but this is easily fixed.
The built-in SIM card is a Godsend. It picks up the signal easily and quickly. This is just so much easier than setting up a GPRS connection with your phone, which was a nightmare on the 520. The coverage was 100% in the place we went to, but this was mostly in urban areas. We expect the £7.99 subscription to be offset by fuel/time savings and GPRS data charges which often came to more than £10 per month on our older TomToms with the Traffic Subscription.
We just love the Google search facility and have only just begun to explore the possibilities. I found it really useful for locating Macdonalds restaurants in London when I needed a comfort break.
The fuel price maps are really good too, again, we need to explore the 'find the cheapest fuel on the route' option, but the prices it showed were accurate and up to date. I had huge frustration with the old 520 when I ran low on fuel once and used the POI menu to locate the nearest fuel...the first THREE places it sent me had been closed, one of them for several years. It's useful that this new model tells you the name of the station and the brand of fuel they sell.
The camera warnings are generally good, but not completely up-to-date, and it did miss a couple of fixed cameras compltetely
The dock is great, but I'd still recommend people to remove it every time you park. This design makes it much less likely you'll damage the plug socket.
The speech recognition seems to work ok but is somewhat limited.
The journey times are now much more accurate. We were really surprised about just how accurate the predicted delays were.
Overall, we are very pleased with our new gadget. Unfortunately for our company, we'll have to buy three more to avoid squabbles between our drivers.
you won't regret it
by Mr. J. R. Rogers from Ilfracombe, Devon UK on 2009-02-04
I put off SatNav for ages because of the price and arguing that I wouldn't use it enough to warrant the expense. Then I looked at all the alternative as the prices came down. Then I chose this one and having compared it with friends using other systems I feel righteously smug and vindicated. It's a hands free that reads me my text messages too, it warns me of live speed cameras and shows the speed limit, tells me how many minutes early or late I am running (it's eta is rarely more than a minute out)... oh yes, it's pretty good at telling me which way to go too! Even which lane to be in - with ample advance warning. Argue with it at your own risk - it is right 95% of the time (or more) and it is happy to concede your corrections with new short cuts/alternatives. I always thought the voice would be annoying but its reassuring - even when you have Yoda guiding your way...
Best of all, its simple to get up and running - no techie knowledge necessary, and very easy to use. It won't run for long on a charge (3 hours or so) but most will run it plugged into the cigarette lighter socket so this isn't an issue. It slips in a pocket easily so you don't have to stress about what to do with it when parked - you can even use it on foot - beats the AtoZ!
Subscribe to the traffic updates - not only reasonable but exceptional value and worth the cost the first time it saves you an hour or so stuck in a tailback (I've had it 3 months and its done this 9 times)- and you'll be ahead of the game, take the time to try out the different ways of programming your journey/route too, and how to add routes of your own that it may not be up to date with.
It may be overkill for someone who only potters locally and already has a hands free but for anyone else it's essential, it;s the best and most of all, it's reassuring.
If you can afford it, this Tomtom is a revelation.
by N. Bristow from on 2008-12-15
We've all experienced the dilemma, haven't we? We want to change the route on our satnav, perhaps as a result of congestion, and we're trying to press the buttons whilst driving, without anyone seeing us perform such a crazy stunt.
If you can accept the usual Tomtom failures, as described by other reviewers, then this device is worth considering for one reason alone; its ability to automatically navigate around congestion without having to press a single button whilst on the move.
Unlike other traffic data systems, which update every fifteen minutes, Tomtom's new system anonymously looks at the speed at which mobile phones are travelling along roads, and that data is used to update your route (if necessary) every three minutes - completely hands free.
Sure, Tomtom's 3d view isn't as good as Navman's, the font used to display the street names is difficult to read, the noise dependant volume control doesn't seem to work, the voice commands take some getting used to and don't always work either, the Google search is not as good as Navman's new Bluetooth/mobile phone linked search system and Tomtom's customer services are bogged down because so many customers don't read their instruction books, but this device is such a revelation that I'd put up with a lot.
With live traffic, speed camera and fuel price updates, you only have to save 26 pence worth of fuel per day for the £7.99 monthly charge (after the initial 3 month trial) to be worth paying.
If you're the sort of user who sticks their satnav in the wrong place on your windscreen, drives along the motorway with your display set to the closest zoom setting so that junctions are always a big surprise, and can't quite get to grips with changing to a night time display when it's dark then this device may not be for you, but if you're prepared to learn how to use it properly then you will not be disappointed.
