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(More customer reviews)Buy this instead of their bundle with their bluetooth GPS. Vuy the Holux GPSlim instead, it's the same receiver but in a more convenient package which doesn't need to be powered on every time and has a replaceable battery and external antenna connection.
This review is based on six months of daily use and a couple of 3500 mile trips through western USA and Canada.
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 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 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.
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.
In Death Valley the POI list was positively dangerous. My rented SUV was down to about 100 miles range and Tomtom was telling me to go back through Death Valley to get gas. In the event there was a gas station about 20 miles ahead of me. I passed three more gas stations before I got to Las Vegas, and even there it only listed a few stations. Fortunately they are well signposted.
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 for in city 'fastest' routes. 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.
I have contacted Tomtom customer support about the...Read more›
Click Here to see more reviews about: TomTom Navigator 5 Software with Maps of North America for compatible PDAs with Bluetooth
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