TomTom Go 1000 Live review

It’s been a while since we saw a fresh design from TomTom, with the Go x30, x40 and x50 series all sharing essentially the same case. The new Go 1000 Live may not look hugely different to TomTom’s last satnav, but there are quite a few changes and improvements.

Chief among these is the new capacitive touchscreen. At 4.3in, it’s no larger than before but it means you don’t have to prod the screen as with the older resistive screens for your touch to register. We could be mean and say that the switch to capacitive technology is long overdue, but it’s still one of the first satnavs we’ve seen with this screen type.

Another highlight is multitouch support which means you can pinch to zoom in and out of the map. This isn’t quite as slick as on the iPhone, but it’s a welcome feature. The screen still has a 480×272 resolution, but the maps are more detailed, showing more accurate lines, images and borders. Villages, for instance, are shown in a shaded colour. There are also 2m extra kilometres of road coverage across 45 European countries.

The menus have been given a facelift: there are six main menu items onscreen and logical sub-menus behind each. This is in stark contrast to the old system where you had to scroll through many screens to find what you wanted. You can swipe to move between sub-menus, and this felt more responsive than zooming on maps. When entering a destination, the letters appear above the button as they do on an iPhone’s keyboard. Once you’ve entered the address (which you can also do via surprisingly accurate voice recognition), the 1000 shows a local map and gives you the options to alter the destination to a nearby car park. If you select one, you can then scroll between the others, and phone numbers are shown.