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Life With My TomTom Go 700 GPS
Until about a year ago, I looked with scorn upon satellite navigation. Who needs it? But then we got upgraded to a rental car in Germany once with it built in, and I was a believer. A believer so much that I decided I needed to have a system for myself. I ended up going with TomTom for reasons I can't now quite recall. I'm sure it wasn't just because I thought the name was cool. I actually have two TomTom systems. I run Navigator 5 on my Dell Axim X50v, and later on I'll talk more about that, getting a nice car mount for it and loving how it guides me to Google, Yahoo or wherever when I make a jump back to the US for work trips.
I went for the Pocket PC version because I though it made more sense. I'm a Pocket PC user (well, I guess Windows Mobile 5 now with the Dell upgrade), so why bother getting a standalone version? Why bother? My wife. I wanted her to be able to use the system if needed at times, and I quickly realized the Pocket PC system wasn't going to fly. Love, first you set up the Pocket PC mount. Now plug the charger into the lighter and run the cable to the mount's power input. Now run this other cable over to the Bluetooth GPS unit. Turn that on. Wait a minute or two, then make sure it's syncing with the Pocket PC. What? It's not? Reboot the Pocket PC, then try to reestablish the partnership.... That just wasn't going to happen. I can get through this minor hassles easily enough. But if technology gives my wife even the slightest problem, she bolts, and I get blamed. Sky+ (the UK version of TiVo) is great because it (usually) works to record all of her shows effortlessly. Buying that made me a genius. The automatic coffee machine for Christmas? Genius. The Windows Media Center PC in the kitchen? Now that it works properly and she's got Sky on in there to catch the odd recorded episode of "I'm A Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here," I'm a genius. I'm more a genius these days because years of being a failure has taught me to prescreen tech before I push it her way. I got Navigator (3 at the time) last February and stuck with it because the new TomTom Go all-in-one units were coming but not fast enough to help me with some business trips to the US. But when they finally arrived, I made the plunge and got one of those as well. I went for the top of the range, the TomTom 700. They used to have a nice comparison chart explaining the differences, but that's gone away. Fortunately, Mike over at the great Pocket GPS World gives the rundown here: New range of TomTom GO hardware. In summary, it goes like this:
I never, ever use the remote control, so that shouldn't incent you to dive into the 700, at least from my point of view. I was attracted by having everything on the hard drive, which was indeed handy for Germany. I had not only the detailed maps but also saved time in that I didn't have to do the load, unload maps thing. The downside is having a hard drive makes me nervous that it will fail in three to five years. Sure, by then I'll probably have moved to something else. But the solid state ones will keep going. What about the 500 versus 300? The hands-free is very cool, when you live in a country where you can't talk on the phone unless you use hands-free. I've had calls come in and can hear easily. Being heard is a little hard, but I could probably tweak that if I really used it much. I haven't yet set up an address book, but that looks good. And in theory, I can even get text messages with my phone linked to it (a Windows Mobile 5 upgraded SPV C500). So if you're doing some talking, that step up from the 300 probably makes sense. There's also a new TomTom One system out, cheaper than the 300. It's smaller than the 300 but aside from that, looks just as capable if not better. I found a review of it here especially talking about it versus the Go, and honestly, if I were to do it again, I might have gone downscale for it. But it wasn't offered when I made my plunge. So how's life with what I did go for? Generally good, with the caveat that I hardly use it. I'm not out and about that often. When I am, it's usually a local trip to take the kids to football practice or shopping in nearby Salisbury. But we've done three major trips with the Go so far. First, we had a weekend down near Weymouth. Ah, a nice British day out at the seaside, sitting in a tent and watching the rain come down. But the fish and chips were good! Anyway, this was the first big outing. The new Gos have postcode navigation. Enter a postcode, and away you go. Unlike US ZIP codes, postcodes are very precise. They take you to an individual house. The only problem was, TomTom didn't have the exact postcode matching the hotel my wife gave me. So I went for one that was closest. It got us almost all the way there just fine with only two glitches. Once it wanted me to turn, but it made no sense. So I drove on, and that was the right thing to do. Another time, my onscreen icon suddenly jumped and had me out way off the road. About a quarter mile later, it jumped back. The almost part was the last half mile. We ended up in a caravan park and no clue where to go next. And this lead to my wife being disgusted with the GPS and upset I didn't just have a map. "But we're pretty much there!," I said. Then we had a good laugh at how I'd gone from the typical male response of not asking directions to having something giving me directions, yet we still end up in a fight :) Anyway, a little exploring down another road, and we found our way to the hotel. Once there, getting back to the place when we did little outings was easy. You can memorize the GPS position of any place you're at, though it could be much easier. Ideally, when I touch the screen, I want to see a big button right on the screen that says "Memorize GPS position." That would be handy if you're driving along, see a spot, store or whatever you want to recall later. Instead, you have to:
We used the system quite a bit for little trips in the Weymouth area, and overall, I was pretty pleased. Once it took us back to the hotel in a way that seemed way too longish, but I didn't know the area enough to be certain of this. The next big trip with it was out to Wales from Wiltshire, to my mother in law's house. No problem. It directed me along a route exactly as we would have gone without it. Indeed, we really didn't need it, I just wanted to play. But it's also nice because it gives you an ETA and the kids always love it saying at the end, "You have reached your destination." My third big trip was on Boxing Day, the day after Christmas. We went out to Stourhead, a beautiful National Trust property a short drive from our home. My wife's been there several times but wasn't certain exactly how to reach it from a friend's house we went to before going on to Stourhead. So I had an excuse to take it, and I do like to play with gadgets. Here, I had a major annoyance come up. When you want to go somewhere, you touch the screen and then select the Navigate To... button. That brings up another screen with these choices:
We didn't know the postcode of Stourhead, so that was out. And Stourhead isn't a city, nor did we know the address, so we couldn't use the Address or City Center options (though I tried). Clearly, Stourhead is a Point Of Interest. So, I punched that in. Annoyingly, I couldn't then type in a few letters to find it, in the way you can with addresses. Nope. You've got to first pick a type of POI. Well, was it a "Park & Recreation" POI or a "Tourist Attraction" one or what? More annoyingly, the POI option brings up POIs that are closest to you. Now, that's not a bad idea in some ways. You're in a town, you need the nearest tourist office, so you hit POI then Tourist Information Office. The closest one comes first and then so on. But with the TomTom Go 700, since you have ALL OF EUROPE on the hard drive, you find things listed that aren't even in Britain. More to the point, what do you do to find a POI at a place you aren't near but want to go to. That's where POI In City comes in. Choose that, type in the city name using the touchscreen keyboard, and now you can get POIs near that area. My wife remembered Stourhead was near the city of Mere, so I punched that in to get POIs nearby. Then thinking Stourhead must be under Park & Recreation, I tried that category. No dice. Nearest part was Hyde Park in London, 95 miles away. Fourth on the list were parks in Holland! Scenic/Panoramic View? Again, no dice. I gave up, because the kids where now restless, as was my wife and mother in law. She figured she knew the way, so there was no sense in me playing more. I punched in Mere using the City Center option and off we went. But then as we drove, I talked her through checking the options again. Finally, doing POI In City for Mere, the Tourist Attraction category brought up Stourhead. So in the end, we got the destination programmed. But ideally, I should have been able to just keyword search through the entire database without needing to pick a city, then pick a category. Did I miss something? Apparently not, as I'm not the only person with this gripe. A forum discussion here covers it, as well. I did some additional searching, but there doesn't appear to be a solution. I will try a post to TomTom support and see if I get luck that way. It's incredibly frustrating. When we were about at Stourhead, we saw a turnoff marked by a National Trust sign. We took that, even though TomTom wanted us to keep going. I'm not sure if it was trying to route us to an alternative entrance or not and didn't care to explore further. But it was another of those things that makes you lose a little bit of faith. This all brings me to our trip to Germany. We headed out a few days before New Year's, and this was a perfect test for my TomTom. No excuses needed to use it -- it was going to be handy to get around, especially in that my sister-in-law's family had moved to a new home. We arrived at Munich airport, then got our rental car. I decided with the snow that it made sense to have a car with winter tires on it, so I paid the extra and ended up with sat nav included. So now I had TWO sat nav system. And you betcha, I switched them both on. I didn't lug (it's actually really lightweight) my TomTom over not to use it. But I couldn't resist switching on the one in the car. It was also kind of fun. I couldn't switch the built-in system to speak in English but managed to figure out how to program the destination. So on the trip, I had both German and English instructions coming my way. A nice way to practice my German! TomTom Go doesn't have postcode navigation for Germany, but we had the street address, and that worked fine. We arrived at our destination without trouble. The next day, we headed to the ski resort of Rottach-Egern. Specifically, we wanted to go to Wallberg cable car area to do some tobogganing. But the POI search thing came up again. Wallberg wasn't listed as a tourist attraction near Rottach-Egern. It wasn't under Park & Recreation. Scenic/Panoramic? Nicht! If Wallberg is a POI in TomTom, I have absolutely no way of finding it. To be fair, the in car navigation didn't have Wallberg either -- though both GPS systems really should have listed such a prominent place. But since we were following my brother in law, we didn't really need to get to the exact end destination. We could just follow him. We didn't really need the GPS at all, since we were following him. Well, we got separated in the last 20 miles or so, when we turned onto a busy road and we got stuck, unable to turn until traffic cleared more. When we got to Rottach-Egern, he'd already found parking at Wallberg full up. Instead, he thought we should get lunch and gave us the address of a restaurant, which was good, as we were starved. "If TomTom gets us to this restaurant, I'll love it forever," my wife told me. The ultimate test had arrived. In went the address, 10 minutes later we were there. She loves TomTom completely now. One thing I noticed above our car GPS was how cool it was knowing that there was a traffic problem along a particular route. My understanding is that radio stations broadcast this in a way that some GPS systems can tap into. TomTom can't do that. You can subscribe to a somewhat similar traffic service it offers, where going through the internet, it will bring back changes and set up alternative routes. The downside is you have to pay TomTom for the service, plus it depends on getting to the internet through your mobile phone -- so you'll have those charges, as well. Since I don't drive much, it's not something I've tried so far. On the flip side, TomTom's very good at coming up with alternative routes if you see trouble. Say you're driving along and you hear a route is blocked ahead or you can see it. Hit Find Alternative and options to get new routes come up. This was super handy for me when Chris Sherman and I were both heading off to a meeting at Google. We were in different hotels but not that far apart, and we drove separately as we had different places to go to afterward. About two miles from the exit, an accident had snarled traffic. I punched in for an alternative route and hit surface streets over, arriving with plenty of time. Chris sadly was stuck and came in about 15 minutes afterward. Chalk another one up for sat nav! If you want to know more about TomTom Go, here are a couple of things to check out:
I'm planning to play more with TomTom with a focus on two main things. I'd like to check out how well it works to find speed cameras, probably using the Pocket GPS World Safety Camera Database. I don't actually want to speed and avoid the cameras. I just find it handy to help ensure I'm not accidentally going over the limit when near them. I also want to play with having my kids voices giving me directions, rather than Jane, the British woman who's voice I use. Haven't read through it yet, but The Ultimate Guide to Creating Custom Tomtom Voice Files looks promising. Easy guide to putting your own voice commands on the TTG and Idiots guide to TomTom Voices. This software might be useful. Postscript: I heard back from TomTom on the POI issue, and no luck there: We are sorry to inform you, but we do not support this feature at the moment. We are always researching new features and developing them when necessary. Please check our website frequently on any news concerning new features, updates and upgrades.By Danny Sullivan on Jan. 6, 2006 | Permalink See related posts in: GPS, Gadgets
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