Review by Chris Hann for Motorola Motonav TN765T 5.1-Inch Widescreen Bluetooth Portable GPS Navigator with Lifetime Traffic
Rating:
Thanks to Amazon for a very prompt refund! In twelve years this is the only item I have ever returned to Amazon.

Let’s start with the headlines, the good the bad and the ugly

Good:

* Very good screen resolution compared to other GPS of this type

* Address search is way fast – 6 seconds to calculate a coast to coast trip

* Good screen brightness

* Thin and light

* Lots of extras, live search options, fuel prices and all else

* Very good map and junction detail

* Physical map overlay on the 2D views

* Easy to change between 2D and 3D view

* Good phone integration – works with an LG Dare

* Good phone contact search

* Good volume and easy controls – but there is a down side

* Very well rendered 3D landmarks – but there’s more to that too

* GPS lock on is very very fast. By the time it came up from cold the first time it was already locked on.

* The traffic receiver appears to be much more sensitive than the Garmin one

* Much better mount than Garmin or Tomtom, more reach, more adjustable and has locking joints.

Bad:

* Hesitates during text entry. Makes it difficult to know if it has accepted the keystroke and thus makes typing difficult

* Fiddly mount – not easy to locate the GPS correctly without practice

* Rear mounted buttons are easy to catch accidentally, especially when trying to adjust the angle

* If there’s a way to enter custom POIs I haven’t seen it yet

* Recent calls list appeared to be out of order, maybe oldest first?

* The adverts say Google, the menu says Bing

* The 2D North Up display hunts from side to side

* On high volume the speaker can be buzzy.

* Way fewer 3D landmarks than the advertising and manual suggest.

* Traffic information was iffy. It diverted me round incidents that were long gone or had never existed.

Ugly:

* Adverts! They come from the traffic receiver and interfere in other things.

* In 3D view the furthest you can see is about a mile. As you try to zoom further it turns in to 2D and reduces the distance you can see ahead.

* The auto zoom always zooms in until you are looking at just the next few hundred yards at most

* I took 16 minutes off a 90 minute predicted journey. It’s hard to beat a Garmin route or ETA.

* Re routing likes to get you back to the route it suggested, long after it becomes ridiculous.

Even after paying $330 for the unit and possibly another $50 per year for MotoExtras the traffic service is supported by advertising. This isn’t just the little pop-up adverts that sit at the top right of the screen with no apparent way to dismiss them. I got a pop-up for Red Lobster, now I can’t search for any restaurant without Red Lobster being inserted at the top. I guess they have a relationship with some vendors and push them to you. I thought I bought a GPS not an advertising portal!!!

To select a destination you can drag the screen, touch and move, don’t tap. This works well in 2D. Just drag the map until you find where you want then zoom in to get a precise location. Hold your finger on the destination until the options pop up and select the destination flag. Alternatively tap the screen then enter the address or business name. I am in San Francisco CA, it took six seconds to plot a route to an address in the woods near Manchester NH, 2500 miles away. I could not route from the US to a Canadian destination, so cross border routes seem to be a problem.

POI searches are limited to your local, it showed me nearby locations for Elephant Bar but not the one in Dublin, 18 miles away, that I wanted to go to. Probably OK in a big city, not so good in central Nevada. I currently pay to not have adverts on my Nuvi 670, this doesn’t not seem to be an option on the TN765t.

The windshield mount has adjustable locks on the moving joints, it give good flexibility and yet can be locked tight. Mounting the unit was a little fiddly, the locating pins are hard to find by touch.

It’s a nice machine, but I am sending it back. A 3D view is best for seeing where you are and what is coming next but the way Motorola has implemented it robs you of the necessary long distance view. At under a mile you are only looking 40 seconds or so up the road. Not far enough to see where you are in relation to other things. With the auto zoom on, Garmin will show you hundreds of miles ahead when you have a long way to the next turn. The TN765t shows only a few hundred yards. Useful to see if there’s a turn coming, but not to see if you are passing a city or coming to a ferry in ten miles.

When you are navigating somewhere the route is displayed down the left of the display as a vertical bar. The distance traveled is shown as a bar graph moving up from the bottom. Traffic issues are shown as red areas on the line. The time to go is shows at the bottom. If you tap this line you get an overall view of the route with known incidents and your route displayed, but it is very small. In the SF Bay Area on a Friday afternoon there are so many incidents that you can’t see the route or the traffic. The Garmin traffic display works much better. The right 2/3rds of the display has plenty of resolution to show its normal display. The left has two buttons that allow you to select various views including route information, turn by turn directions, traffic details and so on.

Routing round traffic the Motonav initially didn’t want me to leave I880 though the Garmin told me there was a 25 minute delay. Once the traffic cleared up the Motonav wanted me to take side roads in East Oakland on the opposite side of I880 from my destination. The Garmin knew there was no traffic and directed me straight home. At that time the Garmin was telling me I had 8 minutes to go and the Motonav said 19. I made it home in 6.

Connecting and syncing my LG Dare phone via Bluetooth was very easy. At full volume the Bluetooth hands free phone was buzzy and distorted, the far end said that the call was very clear, especially compared to the Garmin. Reducing volume cured that. Voice recognition was poor for my deep toned English accent.

The map display shows restaurants and warning indicators on the 3D display, it also shows Arco gas stations but not my favorites, Shell. I’d like to know how to add the POIs that matter to me. Maybe it’s possible and I just haven’t found it yet? In the Garmin and Tomtom it is easy to add the current POI list for Starbucks and Dunkin Donuts. For what it’s worth the Tomtom does a better job of showing them.

To change between 2D and 3D tap the eye symbol on the left then tap the current setting and the three options are shown. In 2D modes you can zoom far out so that you can see the whole country. The 2D views also overlaid the physical map, so you could see the roads picking their way through the mountains. This can be very useful. You can also disable autozoom here.

The track up displays, 2D and 3D, hunt from side to side at low speed. When you stop the map sometimes spins as the position shifts slightly, GPS is accurate to 10m so you can appear to be wandering slightly even when stationary and especially when coverage is bad. Coverage was good and the Garmin doesn’t do this.

Voice commands are clear and timely. Voice warnings are also given for ’safety cameras’ and speed traps. If you want to mute the sound you just have to tap the button on the bottom right rear.

In the advertising and manuals the 3D views show a city with all the major buildings as landmarks. Right now there are very few shown in San Francisco, but there may be a download to improve this soon. I have not seen it, if I do I will update.

The map rendering is smooth compared to other PNDs I have used. Motorola obviously didn’t go cheap on the processor the way Garmin does. Garmin tends to spoil the whole effect to save ten bucks on the processor. At freeway junctions the lane choices are shown at the top of the screen. Very useful, though not 100% accurate, 7 lanes shown when there are 8 or 6 in reality.

So, most of it works great, but some of the bits that I really rely on, and need, aren’t acceptable. After about four hours of side by side comparison we still prefer the Garmin 670. They just haven’t got the usability right. With the Garmin I very seldom need to change the zoom to see something else, when I am close to a turn I have the detail I need and further out I have the big picture. Garmin has always been good at the auto zoom.

So near and yet the issues are just something I can’t live with.

Their web sites are still in Beta and the upgrade site isn’t available yet, however there’s an update application to download and install instead. Once I fired it up I was informed there were two updates, 12MB and 474MB, probably program and maps. I installed both with no problems. I believe I registered on three different associated web sites before I finally got a username and password for all the things I needed.

The Motorola Extras package is $50 per year or $100 for 3 years. I don’t think I need that, my phone already does all that, so it provides nothing to me though it is convenient.

FWIW this is certainly not as good as the factory fit navigation in the Infiniti QX56 or the Ford Flex’s Sync system.

Review by G. Nigrosh for Motorola Motonav TN765T 5.1-Inch Widescreen Bluetooth Portable GPS Navigator with Lifetime Traffic
Rating:
Sold the SUV with the built-in Nav system and did not want to spend $1600 for bulit-in on the new car. Went for this unit after a lot of research. The best screen I’ve seen on a portable: great size, sharp colors, great text on nearby roads. Unit was easy to set up, & it is easy to type in destinations. Voice commands are problematic: any noise such as wind causes confusion. Having my cell phone via the Nav system is ok, but causes me to strech to get at commands such as mute. I’d rather have it linked to the car’s bluetooth, but then I can’t get the functions which rely of a cell connection.

Unit uses Navteq maps, so similar to many other units. However, the software seems to be better than other similiar models, and voice commands have more detail.

My dash is deep, so I usually have to dismount the unit to input complex addresses. Since there are many command buttons all around the unit, and because of the design of the cradel, dismounting is often awkward, with the unit either ending up on the floor, or several commands are triggered. I would also like to have a wall charger rather than having to use the USB charger hooked to my PC.

But, the pros outweight the cons for this $300 unit, so I would recommend it for all but the experts who have more demands than I do.

Review by Alex Honda for Motorola Motonav TN765T 5.1-Inch Widescreen Bluetooth Portable GPS Navigator with Lifetime Traffic
Rating:
I really wanted to love the MOTOROLA MOTONAV TNT765T GPS UNIT. This is the first GPS system that I own, other than on my Droid phone, and I found it to be confusing at times.

=== FIRST USE ===

The first time I used it I entered the location of a public library near my house, which I knew the location of. I was going to pick up a friend there and so I wanted to test the accuracy of the GPS and route. Anyway, as I started driving down the street the satellite picked up my location and started following and guiding me. And then it wanted me to turn down a particular street, which I didn’t do, thinking that it would re-calculate. It did but then it wanted me to turn down another side street, which is not the most direct way to this library. This went on and on and finally it stopped talking altogether. Very strange.

Perhaps it was because this was its first use and it had to orient itself to the area? I’m not sure.

=== DROID GPS VS MOTONAV ===

But when I first used the GPS Navigator on my Droid phone, to find a Marie Calendar’s Grill near the LAX airport, all I had to do was touch the “voice search” icon, say the name, and it listed the place. I then selected it and it gave me voice directions right to the restaurant. So it was much easier to use the GPS navigation on my Droid phone rather than using the MOTONAV.

=== TRYING TO FIND A STORE OR LOCATION WHILE DRIVING ===

My advice is to not use it while driving. I tried it several other times on different days and it was really difficult to pinpoint a location. DO NOT USE WHILE DRIVING, because this is really hard to do because you have to take your eyes off the road for too long trying to hit buttons.

The touch screen has to be pressed really hard and you’re liable to type a wrong key, which throws the search off. In order to backspace or delete a character you have to hit the tiny “back arrow” located at the top-middle of the screen. The “voice search” misunderstands you most of the time and if you use the “Bing” search tool, which works better at understanding what you’re saying, but it will pull up the closest location to you and you can’t search for another location (i.e. a store like Vons with multiple locations).

=== NAVIGATION ===

Once you add in your destination and it can find it, it will pretty much get you there. The voice will guide you, although it’s a little low on the volume–even though I have it turned all the way up–with the window down you really have to listen carefully to hear it. You’ll see the street names going by on the MOTONAV and it’s really easy to read, so that’s a plus. And the route you’re to take is highlighted and you’ll see yourself as a blue arrow, so that’s also easy to read.

Maybe the first few times that the navigation screwed up was a fluke, but it’s still hard to input a location or use the “voice search” feature.

=== BLUE TOOTH HANDS FREE CALLING ===

Now this is where it might really be an advantage especially for Droid phone users. The MOTONAV will download the Droid’s contact list, storing phone numbers etc. in its own memory. From there, a Droid user can make calls through the MOTONAV UNIT with only one touch of a button. So far, I don’t think there are many (if any) blue-tooth devices that actually supports true hands free calling for Droid cell phones.

Pairing with the Droid was easy and you can transfer calls from the MOTONAV to the DROID and back again with one button.

=== EXTRAS ===

*** Displays icons that feature restaurants, motels/hotels, gas stations, and points of interests.

*** Can be used in a car or as a pedestrian and it will provide routes for car, walking, bus or bicycle.

*** Shows icon for red light cameras (and will also speak a warning) as well as speed traps, weather, and traffic reports. This service is free for three months and then you have to start paying for it.

=== ACCESSORIES ===

*** Windshield/Dash Mount Kit; Cigarette Adapter; Micro/Reg USB Cord (for charging in USB port on computer); NO AC ADAPTER

So even though there are some really good uses and features on the MOTONAV TN765T, especially for DROID phone users who are looking for true “hands free” calling, I can only give it 3-stars. It costs too much for non-DROID phone users and DROID phone users have a better GPS navigation system built into their phones.

=== UPDATE: 04/11/2010—!!! HEADS UP !!! ===

Make sure the vehicle charging cradle and cord is actually powering your MOTONAV TN765T GPS unit. I’ve been using it all this time and just found out that the unit was running on the charged battery, rather than the vehicle power adapter.

I charged the MOTONAV initially from my computer and always take it inside when I’m out of the car and charge it with the USB cord, so I never noticed before.

The light on the head of the cord that plugs into the car’s adapter is lit green when plugged in and the unit will turn on when it’s placed into the mount holder, so I always assumed that it was running on the car’s power source. But the other day the battery discharged because I didn’t recharge the batter at home, while I was driving around with friends, and it didn’t charge or turn back on with it plugged into the vehicle charger. That’s when I realized that something was defective.

If you’re like me and just got the MOTONAV and haven’t made any road trips, don’t make long drives, or are constantly charging from the USB cable and computer, make sure you check and see if the car charger is actually powering the unit.

The only way to do that is let the batter drain completely and then plug it into the car’s charger. It should power up.