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:
- TomTom Go 300: 200MHz processor and 32MB of memory. Detailed maps of the
UK (or country you buy it in).
- TomTom Go 500: 400MHz processor, so faster than the 300, plus you get the
major roads of Europe — allowing you to navigate if you go outside the UK.
Can also let you do handsfree calling through your mobile.
- TomTom Go 700: Same as the 500, except you have a 2.5GB hard drive rather
than running off a SD card, plus 64MB of memory. You get detailed maps of all
of Europe and a remote control.
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:
- Touch the screen, choose Arrow to the next one
- Choose Add Favorite
- Choose Arrow to get past the initial screen that comes up
- Then choose GPS position
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:
- Home (you can program this in, very handy)
- Favorite (a list of memorized destinations, also handy)
- Address
- Recent Destinations
- Point Of Interest
- Postcode
- Point On Map
- City Center
- Point Of Interest In City
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:
-
TomTom GO 700 Review is a nice, long review with plenty of screenshots.
- My TomTom Go is a great site with
support forums.
- TomTom Forum Links is a
page at TomTom where they point at various third-party forum areas.
- Pocket GPS World is a great
overall site but geared more I’d say toward TomTom Navigator users. However,
they’ve got POI databases you can download for TomTom, plus what appears to be
a great speed camera database.
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.
