Pocket PC Navigation (TomTom Navigator Great Britain)

Member Name: dom68

Product:	TomTom Navigator Great Britain
Date:	03/12/04 (1870 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Route Planning, Avoiding blockages

Disadvantages: Out of date maps, No PIO warnings

I purchased TomTom Navigator along with my HP iPAQ 2210 about 10 months ago. I travel about 18000 miles a year and this product has been a great asset. It saves me having to make route notes and keep referring to road atlases. For town driving it is even better as road maps do not show all local roads. I initially purchased version 3.0 but have now upgraded to v3.03 (427). I use it with a wired GPS receiver which simply plugs into the cigarette lighter in the car.

In most cases you run the application and then bring up the Navigator Menu. You can then choose where you want to go; a recent location, an address, a favourite location or even a Point of Interest (more on these later). The address can be based on a post code or you can enter the town, street name etc yourself. Your ‘Home’ address can be saved as a key favourite place as you will be going here most frequently. If the GPS sensor is connected and you have a valid signal the program will then plan a route for you from your current position to your destination. All you need to do then is drive normally and the Pocket PC will tell you which turnings to take as you approach them and then again when you arrive at the turning until you get to your destination.

If you take a wrong turn or do not follow the instructions the program will try to calculate a new route based on your current position. If no suitable route is available it will tell you to turn round as soon as possible. If this occurs you may be able to select an alternative route (but it may use local roads and be slower than turning round and going back) by tapping the screen to bring up the navigator menu and selecting ‘Alternative Route’. You can also use this to avoid roads that you do not want to use (for example if the road is blocked by an accident). You can also specify areas that you want to avoid, the central London congestion charging zone is already defined and can be avoided if you wish.

On the maps TomTom shows selected Points of Interest (POI). You can select which POIs are displayed, databases covering everything from petrol stations to burger joints and speed cameras to holiday camps are available. Those that are selected display as an graphic icon on the map. As stated before you can select POIs as destinations, so if at any time you need to find the nearest ‘Shell’ [other petrol stations are available] petrol station you can select this as your destination and the program will calculate the best route to get you there.

The maps are supplied with the software and you can download as much of the map as you require. If you do not travel far (or do not have much available memory on your Pocket PC) then you can use a map that just covers two or three counties. Other maps divide the UK up into four regions and you can use the region that you are in. I use maps of the complete UK, not that I travel that far very often but I think that it is best to have them all there in case I want to and don’t want to download the next map section. The full UK takes up about 130 M-bytes (I use a 256 M-byte SD card in my Pocket PC to store the maps).

For those drivers with a blue tooth mobile phone with GPRS, TomTom provides an add on feature (for a monthly charge) where you can get live traffic information from your mobile phone. This way you set the Navigator to route you around traffic problems as they occur.

When you are using the Navigator with sound turned on, you can choose whether you have a Male or Female voice (I use a female voice) and you can adjust the volume so that you can hear instructions over the radio/road/engine noise. You can select the format of the map that is shown and change the colours. With an add-on you can set it to automatically change colours for day and night driving. On the Navigator screen as you are driving it shows the route that you are following, the direction that you are heading in, the next instruction, the distance to the next instruction, your current speed, the expected time to your destination and the distance to your destination. So that this does not distract you too much you can turn this display off when you reach a predetermined speed.

One of the downsides of the TomTom package is that the maps quickly go out of date (since I purchased mine two new roads have been built in my area, new A120 and a new stretch of the A10) and there is not an easy way to upgrade the maps (or I can’t find one). Other downsides are that TomTom itself does not indicate when you are close to a POI (it would be good if it warned you that you were speeding as you approach a speed camera for example). There are add-on packages that do this (I use GPSAssist) but I would have expected TomTom to have included this feature (may be its not legal in the Netherlands). My iPAQ frequently requires a reset to restart the Navigator when I have not been using it for a while, whether this is a problem with GPSAssist, TomTom or my iPAQ I’m not sure.

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