TomTom has used CeBIT (as usual) to announce it’s new units for the year. These are the 530, 730 and 930 units. In a similar way to last year’s x20 units, the 530 will have UK & Ireland mapping, the 730 has Western and Eastern European mapping, and the 930 will have US, Canada and Western and Eastern European mapping. The units are of a similar style to the existing x20 units, although these new units come in “very sophisticated soft touch black with “real metal” detailing”. Again, as usual, these units come with new software.

More information in the rest of the article.

One of the key features of the new software is that it supports “Lane Separation” (showing and telling you which lane to get into) and “Complex Junction Details”. However, the key new feature is IQ Routing. This will use historic information which gives a true average speed for the road, instead of assuming it’s possible to drive at the speed limit for the length of the road. This is a very interesting feature, and should help stop SatNav devices choosing country routes over slightly longer (but more sensible) routes using major roads. TomTom have already collected 500 million submissions, with most roads already having over 100 submissions each, which should provide useful information. This information is embedded in the maps and varies according to the day of the week and time of day. There does not appear to be a method for this to be updating, although the HD traffic service will supplement this with additional information.

Both the Lane Separation and the Complex Junction support are mainly limited to motorways and primary (trunk) routes.

The 930 also comes with a Bluetooth remote (which is optional on the other versions).

No pricing, nor exact availability is available, although we would expect similar pricing to the current x20 range, and for the majority of the range to be available by mid year.

Some specs and all pictures courtesy of Pocket GPS World.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 5th, 2008 at 9:38 am and is filed under Gadgets. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.