Excellent Unit - once you get over the initial hump

I bought my 720 back in mid-December. Spent a good amount of time reading the tomtomforums website and seeing what other users were going through. The bottom line is that this unit is not for a technical neophyte. There are little tricks to getting this unit stable that are above and beyond the basic install. For instance, the North American maps don't cleanly fit onto the unit's base memory. You have to know what you can delete to fit the maps. Second, there's a little unadvertised "hack" that can enable voice recognition. Third, the POI database is severely limited because of the lack of internal memory. So what do you do...go out and buy a 4GB SDHC card and move all of the map data onto the new card (some people move all of the files from base memory onto the new card). Then you can load the POIs for the 920 unit (a far more complete set) onto the 720. Once you've given it room to breathe...everything stays very stable. Then it is a wonderful unit, great performance, speedy acquisition, and very speedy re-routing. Very flexible routing options through the use of itineraries. But...to get to this point you have to be well-versed in moving and editing files.

One more "word for the wise". TomTom is constantly coming out with new versions of TomTom Home, updates to the unit, map updates, etc. The technically astute user community loads these new items within days of release and then laments about features which now work or don't work anymore. Resist the temptation of grabbing these new software upgrades for as long as you can once the unit is stable. Let the other users cut their teeth on them instead and then pounce when you feel it's safe.