TomTom Navigator 5 Bluetooth Wireless GPS System for Pocket PC, Palm, and Other PDAs
Shop for it:
(added from 1 site)
Description:
[edited 4/09/06 for some final thoughts] This review is based on over six months of daily use and two road trips through much of the western USA and Canada. First, this software with the Holux GPSlim 236 is what I should have...
See more »
[edited 4/09/06 for some final thoughts] This review is based on over six months of daily use and two road trips through much of the western USA and Canada. First, this software with the Holux GPSlim 236 is what I should have bought. The Tomtom GPS receiver is pretty, but the necessity of switching it on each time you use it (rather than it coming on with external power) has made it a pain to own and I'm going to toss it in a drawer or donate it to a GPSless friend. I use a Dell Axim X51v, so performance is not an issue, even on thousand mile routes the initial route calculation only takes a few seconds. Installation. The installation was simple and trouble free. I had heard that getting the product registered might be an issue but as soon as I connected my PDA to the internet and entered the key I got authorized. I guess the individual state maps are on the rest of the CDs, I only needed the installation and the first two map CDs. For myself I'd rather this had been on a DVD. By comparison iGuidance Europe, which is on a DVD, took two trips to the Internet to search for help and quite a bit of messing with the Bluetooth connection before it could see the receiver. Connecting. If the application is started whilst Bluetooth is disabled on the PDA it simply enables it and connects. Other than waiting a few seconds there has never been an issue with the Bluetooth initerface. If you need to pair it the code is 0000. If you need to use a different GPS then tap the screen, hit "change preferences" then three right arrows and then "show GPS status". Hit the "Configure", use the arrows to select the right hardware and hit Select. Easy. In iGuidance I had to add the receiver as an 'outgoing' serial connection and then tell it which com port had been assigned. The hardware works reasonably well, the Bluetooth receiver has mostly locked on fast and stayed locked everywhere except inside tunnels and a ferry, and even there it managed to receive a couple of satellites (how?). Twice the lock on has taken more than ten minutes, I have no clue why, the satellite display showed around eight good signals but it just didn't lock on. A selling point of the hardware is that it shuts off if the Bluetooth link is down for more than a few minutes. That is sensible, no point running the battery down. But there's a down side, if you want to put the receiver somewhere where it can get a good signal, like on the rear parcel shelf and plugged into a power socket in the trunk, then you'd rather not have to climb in the back each time you get in the car to switch on the receiver. In the long run this may be a killer for me, units like the Holux GPSlim236 can be plugged in and forgotten, they can also take an external antenna which the Tomtom can't... though to be fair it shows no sign of needing it either, in the middle of the first floor of a 300' wide multi floor parking structure it still locked onto six satellites. The 3D and normal map displays are both useful, however the zoom controls only last a few seconds and then the map returns to showing only a small section of road ahead. The zoom seems to be controlled partially by proximity to your next turn and partly by local road details, so in urban areas you get about a quarter of a mile. Perhaps they did this for safety, but in that case they shouldn't have provided the controls. In cities this is ok but when you are driving around rural areas it doesn't let you see the area around you, so you can't see if your route is sensible. I have taken to using the browse map view and then moving it as I drive in rural areas. I should be able to zoom the display until it shows a level of detail that is useful to me and it should stay there. When zoomed out the map display does continue to show useful detail, iGuidance drops too many map features and if you are on small remote roads can leave you looking at a blank screen. There are many choices for map colors and it's easy to get day and night color schemes that give good contrast and visibility. You can also choose from several clear male and female voice options, in English these include US, English and Australian accents. Terminology tracks accent, so if you choose English English you get motorways instead of freeways; amusing but not a problem. The text at the bottom of the screen can show the next turn, speed, distance to go, current time, time to go and eta. The choices are configurable, but nothing like the twenty or thirty that Garmin allowed you to choose from six years ago. The text is very small, I have good eyes and I really have to look hard to see the figures. If I'm 400 miles from my next turn I need to know that a lot more than I need to know I'm going to be turning left when I get there. For this sort of price it should be possible to have more control of the information displayed. iGuidance shows even less information and gives you less control. But this is another case where Garmin had a better solution six years ago. Touching the lower right corner brings up the overview of the route, this should have pan/zoom controls and be in the day/night color scheme. For a trip of several hundred miles it's hardly possile to make out the route on the full VGA display of the X51v. The options for finding a destination are easy to use, the ones I have needed were address, city center, POI and point on map. The routing is also non-volatile, so you can stop for the night and resume in the morning. One strange thing is that the previous destinations are stored per map, so if you route to a city on the major roads map and then switch to a more detailed map the destination isn't on the list of recent destinations. The unit exhibits a common problem to north american products, you can't route between countries, you can't ask for a route from Calgary Alberta to Salt Lake City Utah because there isn't a map that has both cities. If you want to route from Bute Montana to Idaho Falls Idaho you have to use the major roads map because the states are on different major maps, west and plains. Worth bearing in mind if you live on a border. Trip time predictions are very poor. For a trip from Alameda CA to Port Angeles WA the initial prediction was around 18 hours, which means they are using an average speed of around 50mph. That may be reasonable for I880 on a Monday at 9am but it's 50% out for I5 in northern california. The actual duration was about 14 hours including stops for food and fuel and a visit to Hertz in Portland, OR. On smaller roads the errors are much larger. For the Nephi UT to Tonopah, NV the predicted time was over eight hours and the actual trip time was just over four. On major rural roads in Canada with a 60mph limit the trip times appear to be based on a 30mph average. Routing is fast and the suggested route is certainly in the right direction, but there are issues related to poor choices of road speeds. The software works out the time taken for various routes based on the average speeds for those road classes, but the low freway and major road settings lead it to choose apparently shorter routes through urban areas, this means that it avoids fast roads like US101. In Calgary it routed my south for miles on city streets when I was only half a mile from Deerfoot Trail which is a 65mph road with no stop lights and ultimately becomes I15 at the border. There are also minor weirdnesses, on my daily commute I take I880 south from Oakland CA to San Jose CA, at I238 it directs me to take the off ramp, then then on ramp back to I880. Strangely, if you start from a different place it is able to route you straight down I880 without detouring to the off ramp. Mostly the routes aren't bad though, but Garmin did it better five years ago. Rerouting: If you ask for an alternate route it seeks an alternate for all of the route. So if you are going from Oakland, CA to Seattle, WA and get stuck in traffic trying to get to the freeway and ask for another route it will not only change the entrance onto the freeway, it will also reroute the rest of the trip, so instead of a long day on I5 you may find yourself on a three day drive up the coast. The simple solution is to divert until you are past the problem and then to resubmit the original destination. There are some major mapping errors, much of the time in Canada and Montana the mapped road position was tens or even hundreds of yards from the actual position. This causes the software to either show you driving through open fields near the road, or down the wrong side of a freeway, or even down the frontage road hundreds of yards away on the far side of the freeway in Banff national park. This causes some strange voice directions too, like "turn around when possible" when you are driving down I15 at 70mph and have been going the right way for hours and have to keep going straight ahead for hours. Most city streets in the US are spot on though. But the maps do seem to be 2-4 years out of date. POI problems. The POI list is very lacking. Maybe half to two thirds of gas stations are missing. But worse is the method of selecting POIs. You can look up stores by name, but in the case of the major chains you can get quite a few hits. In places like the San Francisco Bay Area there's a world of difference between somewhere 11 miles down I880 and ten miles across the bay, the first is a 22 mile round trip and the second could be 70. All you get is a list of stores with distances, no address, no direction. So you can't tell which 15 mile distant place they are in. If you select the wrong one and thereby discover that you need to drive thirty miles and cross a toll bridge to get there then there's no back button, you have to go through the whole POI selection process again. This is a method that is not yet ready for the real world. It took me a good ten minutes to discover that the POI list didn't know about the particular version of the store that I thought it should know, I guess I didn't really need it, but then I'm not always in my own back yard. Garmin gives the address and direction of POIs before you commit to one. The map accuracy and POI list needs a lot of work. Only the main map display follows the day/night color scheme, the route map and browsable maps remain in their standard eye wateringly bright colors. A brightness control would be more useful than night colors, but to get to that you have to go to the PDA settings, not something I feel like doing whilst driving. At the end of November '05 Tomtom released Navigator version 5.21 for Windows Mobile 5. The behavior of the system has certainly changed. The most noticeable thing is that it now strongly prefers the shortest route in many situations. Unfortunately that means that it will now route me on surface streets rather than the adjacent interstate. For example Alameda to Emeryville can be achieved almost exclusively at 60mph+ on I880, I980, I580 and I80 and yet the new version chooses the surface streets at 25mph with lights every block. I suppose it can't be expected to know that the route it chooses goes through West Oakland which has more murders than most European countries. In the Mojave and Death Valley it often routed me down dirt roads when there was a decent highway nearby. Whether it's the map data or the routing, they need to know that a trail formed by a bulldozer driving through the desert isn't the same thing as a metaled road. I have contacted Tomtom customer support about the ludicrous average speeds, however they have not contacted me in a month, much less the 24 hours they promissed. Neither Tomtom not Teleatlas have given any sort of response to my eight map error reports, if I am going to all that trouble to accurately describe their errors the least they can do is acknowledge that they have received them, right now I don't know if they are dropping them in the round filling cabinet. After more research I have found many reports of Tele-Atlas inaccuracies (in the UK, for example, major towns missing and impossible directions at some of the bussiest interchanges in the country, like the M4-M25 near Heathrow airport, which may well be the first interchange many foreigners meet in the UK) and even major cities missing from the database. Compared to iNavigator 2.1.2 Europe: Tomtom update rates are faster, the maps are drawn better, the voice prompts are timed and spaced better. Tomtom shows more useful data than iNavigator, though still not near the standard of old Garmin dedicated units. iNavigator Europe has some serious usability issues related to windows-style menus covering up essential controls like the map zoom and exit buttons. The zoom control on iNavigator is persistant, but not available as often and is very difficult to use whilst driving (on Tomtom the top corners zoom out and in, on iNavigator it's a tiny little control at the bottom center). It may not be fair to compare the US Tomtom (Teleatlas) maps to the European iNavigator (Navtech) maps, but they are about comparable. Both have their issues but will still get you there in the end. On balance still a good product, however I am becoming concerned that the hype of the advertising campaigns isn't matched by world class technical teams. It took more than a month to answer the first support question with "sorry, no". But to be fair, most of it works well. And it is very pretty. Overall I haven't seen a better solution. Around two months after I asked some fairly pointed questions, on their web site, I just received three emails saying that I must update my questions to indicate that I still required support or they would close them if I did not respond in 48 hours. So I did. In each case I commented "yes I still want you to answer my question". That's an interesting technique for clearing your tech support backlog, but it does nothing for your customers. I'm starting to think that all they want is your money and they don't care whether they, or their product, does a good job. Despite my response they closed the calls 48 hours later. Not good. I did finally get some answers from support. You can buy the European maps on-line for a very reasonable price. They don't have any solution for the GPS receiver powering off when it loses bluetooth comms and they don't see it as an issue. I'm looking forward to a software upgrade which I hear should come out soon. I'll update this review when it does. Was this review helpful to you? (Report this)
See less »
Highlights:
List Price: $299.99 | Price: Click here to see the price (Why don't we show the price?) | This item ships for FREE with Super Saver Shipping. Details
Not a Kaboodler? Join Now, It's Free!
| Email: | ||
| Screen Name: | ||
| Password: | ||
| Birthday: | ||
Security Check (Reload) |
|
|
| Enter Both Words | ||
| I have read and agree to the Terms of Service | ||
| Remember me on this computer. | ||
| Kaboodle will send you a newsletter and updates from your friends. You can unsubscribe at any time. Kaboodle does not sell or share your email address or personal information with anyone. | ||
Sign in to Kaboodle
| Email: | |
| Password: | |
| Remember me on this computer. | |
Close
Why do I need to provide my birthday?
Kaboodle requires all users to provide their real date of birth as both a safety precaution and as a means of preserving the integrity of the site. You will be able to hide this information from your profile if you wish.
Holiday Features
Holiday Shopping
Giveaways & More
Latest Sales
Latest Finds
Latest Posts From Our Editors
Copyright © 2009, Kaboodle, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Added by 1 people