Before buying Tom Tom read this.

bagmans911 · Occasional Visitor Joined: Mar 26, 2004 Posts: 31

Unfortunately no product is perfect, do you email Microsoft every time your computer crashes? What would their response be!!!
GPS navigation should not be your only way to navigate around your own home, my 5 year old daughter knows the way around town / supermarkets / ballet, its a pity some people buy TomTom or any other Satnav and expect it to be perfect, for mid/long journeys its fantastic, using the postcode add-on makes it brilliant even when trying to find rural addresses, I can live with the eternal problem of road changes after all I have never found an AA road atlas perfect! But I suppose you would not expect to use that to nav to the nearest supermarket!!
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IPAQ 3970, Fortuna Clip-on BT, TT3, Lexar 32X 256mb SD card.

NigelJ · Posted: Wed Jun 09, 2004 11:00 am Post subject:

Crocodile

You have my sympathy - have you looked at the TeleAtlas site - they seem to expect you to do their job for them by giving them the co-ordinates of missing data! THEY should be able to find missing towns and roads when given the name and approximate location - THEY can always look up a good map can't they?

I gave them a list od missing towns found in TTN 3 BUT which were in TTN 2 - they requested the co-ordinates GRRRRR!

Nj

Darth_Vader · Occasional Visitor Joined: Mar 25, 2004 Posts: 10

Hi,

I agree with most of the comments and would like to return to the very first line of this topic :- The following dialogue between Tom Tom "support" & myself may help in your decision making process”.

I visited this excellent Pocket GPS World forum and read all about the different hardware, software and suppliers. From the depth and quality of the information I was able to put together a suitable navigation package that would not only be a godsend in the car but also could be taken out on country walks, and used for coastal navigation at sea.

I received the equipment before Easter and eagerly got it up and running which for an absolute PPC beginner was not so straight forward. Then at my desk set Tom Tom to navigate from home to two locations of 80 and 200 miles distance of which I travel often and know well. I was bitterly disappointed with the results – I won’t bore you with the details as they have since been thoroughly covered elsewhere except to mention that neither my home location nor my parents location (lived there over 30 years) could be found. I tried a couple of other tests and the results were also disappointing.

I thought “how can I rely on this rubbish to get me to business meetings at unfamiliar locations if I cannot trust the navigation, I’ll have to send it back for a refund because it is not suitable for the intended purpose”. I had nasty negative and angry thoughts but being an optimist decided that if I was going to be negative I was going to be very positive about it and put both the hardware and the Tom Tom 2 software through a thorough test.

A few days later our family set off for a weeks holiday in Cornwall (my first time) and the plan was to lock the Atlas in the car boot and solely rely on this pack of rubbish to get us completely lost so that if in the event I had to stand before a judge in the small claims court I would be able to prove my case without doubt.

We covered around 1000 miles that week from Eastbourne to St Ives and then to other locations Zennor, Lands End, Mousehole, the Lizzard, Padstein (sorry Padstow) the Eden Project and a visit to a childrens adventure park located on an isolated farm down very narrow lanes. The first thing I discovered was that creating an accurate destination was very difficult ( I hadn’t yet discovered the excellent post code utility which is an enormous help) and also very inaccurate. So I would use the map view to get my location then zoom down to street-level and locate a car park or some other convenient spot and say “navigate”.

Our outbound journey was an uncanny experience Navina would warn us as we approached a roundabout or junction and then again just as we went into it. It was eerie but accurate. The funny part was that since the stupid software didn’t know about the Polegate bypass we kept ignoring Navinas directions but she kept on recalculating new routes thus one of my key requirements had been met! As we entered the bypass Navina happily showed us travelling over the fields and recalculated the route once we hit the main road. Hey this stupid software has now met a second requirement of mine and it shouldn’t be doing that. And just then I nearly jumped out of my skin as Navina let out a screaming siren followed by a speed camera warning! Hey this checkpoint and pocketgps overlay surely work. Blow there goes another of my key requirements!

I won’t bore you with the rest of the journeys other than to say only once did it give a false order a “turn left” which would have taken us at that exact point through a gate into a farmers field but it successfully recalculated the route to the next junction. I deliberately left Navina on in petrol stations and was surprised that the satellites could still be tracked. One warning though. At two stations (and they were both in very remote locations Lizzard & Bodmin Moor) caused complete malfunction and even reconfiguration of the software. Both took a lot of debugging but my guess was that there was most likely a hidden mobile phone transmitter possibly in the large price sign that affected the PPC memory.

On return I had to admit that Navina had been very useful and reliable and had met all my criteria. The only issues were with the maps and setting the destinations. The latter has been helped with the discovery of the excellent postcode utility.

Which brings me back to the first line of this topic:- The following dialogue between Tom Tom "support" & myself may help in your decision making process.

In my case I believe that had I read this thread I would eventually have made the same choice of equipment but would not have been so bitterly disappointed, annoyed and frustrated. I have since had my free upgrade to TTN3 and the *?!!**?! software is if anything less reliable and a pain!

Oh! The Polegate bypass is now correctly located and routed and even my road is now marked as an ‘un-named road’!

I wonder now how I managed before I had Navina Gater I’d feel lost (he he) without her giving me instructions and waking me up with safety camera warnings. Better make that SPEED police revenue cameras especially in the case of the A30 heading East towards Redruth. Here lies a straight road without any junctions or impediments it just travels down a fairly steep hill and up the other side - yep a speed camera in both directions!

Cheers Cheers!

,

DV

May the sauce be on all your chips

storeman · Occasional Visitor Joined: Jun 25, 2004 Posts: 6

TomTom, like all gps / mapping software is a 'Navigational Aid'. Maps are compiled months maybe years in advance of release NOT on a daily basis. You see ordnance survey staff out and about plotting the maps and saving the data to be used later on in the map making process.. In the meantime, the local council decides to introduce a new one way system, close a road or even build a new road. Nothing the cartographers (map makers) can do about this until the next roun of surveys. This also affects the digital map maker in the same way, and seeing that the navigational software relies on the digital maps, it affects them too. My maps don't have the M6 toll road plotted, and because I don't live near the M6 toll road I am not familiar with the area. I simply took the tol road and let my software calculate a new route when I got back on a road that it was aware of. How did this miracle happen - simple, I drove the way I always did before I got GPS - I followed the road signs while driving down the uncharted road and took the necessary exit which led me back on to a road that was in the map data.

Crocodile is expecting way too much. I'm waiting for the next complaint when TomTom isn't aware that the road running parallel to the street he lives in has been closed due to a major accident. Should provide an interesting read. I can't wait for him to post the replies from customer support.

grimbo · Posted: Sat Jun 26, 2004 11:41 am Post subject: map error reporting

as a newbie how do i extract the lat & long data to send to the mapping company?
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Iphone & Copilot (Retired- Ipaq 2210 ROM1.10.07, TTN5), Road Angel and occasionally TT one

Fuego · Posted: Sat Jun 26, 2004 1:55 pm Post subject:

I fear the answer might be to use something like CheckPOInt. Like you, I can't see any easy way that it can be done from TTN3.

I use CheckPOInt and POIEdit for other reasons, in any case, so it's less of a problem for me, although I can understand it if other people are reticent to bulk-out their PDAs with additional software.

With CheckPOInt, I have a key assigned to record a POI. I can then later use POIEdit to look at the lat/long of the POI. However, I am not sure what WG84 format XY co-ordinates are ... Sad

I'm assuming the "," separating the two input fields that make up a co-ordinate are actually a decimal point (ala European style), and therefore it wants degrees.fractions (or is it degrees.mmss?) which you can also get from using POIEdit.

Just reproducing the Teleatlas report map faults link here for convenience.
https://www.teleatlas.com/template_feedback.jsp?ctype=support_feedback_pda&contentpage=EnterPDARequest.jsp

Anyway, I agree that there ought to be an easy way from within TTN3 to get co-ordinates.

An alternative approach might be to use http://www.mappoint.com which can give grid coords, lat/long, and XY coords for a given point, assuming that you can locate it on there. However, if you're trying to report a misplaced road, and mappoint has the road in the correct place, then clearly this isn't going to work.

Fuego · Posted: Sat Jun 26, 2004 2:17 pm Post subject:

gokhart · Posted: Sun Jun 27, 2004 2:36 pm Post subject:

??? I think Tomtom's reply was fine. They offered a refund via the supplier, explained the problem and dealt with your emails in a professional manner.

good effort Tomtom in my opinion. Thumbs Up

woody67 · Occasional Visitor Joined: Feb 03, 2004 Posts: 34

What is the problem here?

Surely you know about the roads around your house - ie the one you use 95% of the time, so why do you need TT to navigate this road?

If you just drive in the general direction along the road you know, then won't TT reroute on the fly? And them coming home won't you get to a point and think " Oh, there is my road"?

Would you also like TT to open the door for you when you arrive at your destination?

I tend to use TT for the roads I don't know, and it works fine for those.

barryd · Posted: Sun Jun 27, 2004 8:19 pm Post subject:

barryd · Posted: Sun Jun 27, 2004 8:21 pm Post subject:

Always try out your instructions before posting...
Step 1 should read:
1 - Select Find - Recent Location and select the memorized position then Show on map
Barry Davies

Skippy

Mark R Penn · Posted: Mon Jun 28, 2004 7:34 pm Post subject:

I think what most posters have missed is the point originally made: whether you think the fault found is critical/important/avoidable/to be expected/petty or whatever, the tone of the reply from TomTom was NOT customer friendly. They DO have a responsibility for the data they make money out of, and have no right to speak to customers in the way they did.

"It's not our fault" sticks in the throat when said that way. When said apologetically it can be perfectly acceptable.

I agree there are workarounds which make the actual issue reported less serious than a new user might imagine, but never-the-less they had an unhappy customer on their hands, and should have dealt with that better. Suggesting some of the workarounds would have been a good start.

anarchy-inc · Posted: Mon Jun 28, 2004 8:38 pm Post subject:

Fuego · Posted: Mon Jun 28, 2004 9:01 pm Post subject:

Yep that's the same with a lot of the OX postcodes and the WD ones, not to mention a whole bunch of others. Not really a good excuse for that, unless the P.O. are charging an arm and a leg for the database. Even then, if you purchase the Great Britain map, it seems to me you're paying a fair bit more for much less coverage than if you bought the maps of Europe?

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