TomTom Navigator 6 Maps of Western Europe
Product Type: Tomtom navigation software
Newest Review: ... Tom on my phone and select which map I wanted to use. The first thing I noticed was that the folder size for Eastern European was an aw... more
Tom Tom for Western Europe on your phone
TomTom Navigator 6 Maps of Western Europe
Member Name: caustin10
Product:
TomTom Navigator 6 Maps of Western Europe
Date: 02/11/10
Rating:
Advantages: Accurate and detailed
Disadvantages: can't buy it anymore. The updates crashed
A couple of years ago I decided to splash out on the Western and Eastern European maps for Tom Tom Navigator 6 to allow me to carry out the looooong drive from England to Poland. I was already successfully running Navigator 6 with UK maps on my Nokia N95 so I just bought these maps as an add on. I picked them up 2nd hand for £40 but I understand that they cost around £90 per map if you bought them brand new.
Installation
---------------
The software arrived by CD and it was fairly straightforward to install. You simply connected the phone to the computer via the Nokia software to make the phone visible in Windows Explorer. You then inserted the cd and ,within Windows Explorer, drag and dropped the maps folders from the cd onto the phone. Copying took around ten minutes and once complete I could open Tom Tom on my phone and select which map I wanted to use.
The first thing I noticed was that the folder size for Eastern European was an awful lot smaller than the one for Western Europe. When you get to Eastern Europe you can soon see why - while the Western European map has all kinds of points of interest e.g. supermarkets, hotels, museums, speed cameras etc etc the map for Eastern Europe has very little of this.
Supposedly you can connect the phone to the computer again to download updates to the maps but I was never able to get this to work as the phone rebooted itself whenever I tried.
Use
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My immediate issue with the maps was that they did not integrate well with each other. While everything worked perfectly if I just wanted to stay in Western Europe, as soon as I went further afield it did not automatically pick up the other map. This meant that I had to go into the phone settings to switch from one map to the other. This was a real nuisance as I had to guess where the edge of one map was and where the other one began. It was also impossible to programme in an end to end route so to get round this I used a map to work out the probable route, selected to go as far as Berlin with the Western European map then stopped somewhere, reconfigured Tom Tom to use the Eastern European map, set it to find my final destination and set off again.
Having said that, the maps did get me to my destination without ever getting me lost. The Western European maps were detailed and as I mentioned above had a lot of points of interest included. My main gripe with these was that they took no account of the direction you are heading. If you are on the motorway and want to stop for fuel you can easily found out that the nearest service station is x miles away. The problem is that it doesn't tell you if this is behind you or in front of you or whether the service station is on your side of the road. It's not a big problem when travelling on smaller roads but when you are on on the German Autobahn and see a service station on the other side of the road it's a little difficult to drive through the central reservation!
Conclusion
---------------
Having spoken a lot of the faults I have to say that I am still very happy with the maps. I now own a full size Tom Tom but I don't always have it with me. It's often been really handy to have a similar programme that I can use on my phone. Aside from the problems with updating it, the software has always been reliable and has never crashed during use. It's just a pity that Tom Tom seem to have stopped developping software for the Symbian phones as I am no longer able to buy newer maps for it
Installation
---------------
The software arrived by CD and it was fairly straightforward to install. You simply connected the phone to the computer via the Nokia software to make the phone visible in Windows Explorer. You then inserted the cd and ,within Windows Explorer, drag and dropped the maps folders from the cd onto the phone. Copying took around ten minutes and once complete I could open Tom Tom on my phone and select which map I wanted to use.
The first thing I noticed was that the folder size for Eastern European was an awful lot smaller than the one for Western Europe. When you get to Eastern Europe you can soon see why - while the Western European map has all kinds of points of interest e.g. supermarkets, hotels, museums, speed cameras etc etc the map for Eastern Europe has very little of this.
Supposedly you can connect the phone to the computer again to download updates to the maps but I was never able to get this to work as the phone rebooted itself whenever I tried.
Use
-----
My immediate issue with the maps was that they did not integrate well with each other. While everything worked perfectly if I just wanted to stay in Western Europe, as soon as I went further afield it did not automatically pick up the other map. This meant that I had to go into the phone settings to switch from one map to the other. This was a real nuisance as I had to guess where the edge of one map was and where the other one began. It was also impossible to programme in an end to end route so to get round this I used a map to work out the probable route, selected to go as far as Berlin with the Western European map then stopped somewhere, reconfigured Tom Tom to use the Eastern European map, set it to find my final destination and set off again.
Having said that, the maps did get me to my destination without ever getting me lost. The Western European maps were detailed and as I mentioned above had a lot of points of interest included. My main gripe with these was that they took no account of the direction you are heading. If you are on the motorway and want to stop for fuel you can easily found out that the nearest service station is x miles away. The problem is that it doesn't tell you if this is behind you or in front of you or whether the service station is on your side of the road. It's not a big problem when travelling on smaller roads but when you are on on the German Autobahn and see a service station on the other side of the road it's a little difficult to drive through the central reservation!
Conclusion
---------------
Having spoken a lot of the faults I have to say that I am still very happy with the maps. I now own a full size Tom Tom but I don't always have it with me. It's often been really handy to have a similar programme that I can use on my phone. Aside from the problems with updating it, the software has always been reliable and has never crashed during use. It's just a pity that Tom Tom seem to have stopped developping software for the Symbian phones as I am no longer able to buy newer maps for it
Summary: Handy
