Customer Reviews

TomTom Navigator 5 3-Inch Bluetooth Portable GPS Navigator

5 star:		(15)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(15)

 

 

[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.

This is a great idea, with pretty good software, delivered by a truly awful company.

If you should, like me, happen to switch smart phones twice while you own it, your Navigator 5 really does become a paperweight. You can't activate the software on that third device.

You can write the company about this using the form at their web site, but they don't respond. You can call them (if you can find the phone number), but nobody answers the phone. There isn't even a way to leave a vmail message - the autoattendant gives you a choice between dead silence (if you select customer support) or ringing forever (if you don't). When these methods don't work, the company invites you, via their web site, to send a written letter of complaint - to Amsterdam.

This all sounds so unbelievably bad that I ignored similar comments posted elsewhere on the 'net, figuring that no company could really be that bad and still be in business. I was wrong.

Don't buy the TomTom. For a similar experience, take three hundred-dollar bills, stand in your yard, and light them on fire.

One more point for those who are willing to take a chance on the thing anyway. Consider that there is absolutely no vehicle by which TomTom will EVER update it's maps. What you get in the box is already outdated, and there well never be an update.

I've used TomTom for about a year now. Installation was fine on my Axim X50. Yes, it's a little confusing to install at first, but after the codes are applied, adding additional maps is easy.

When it has the address, the GPS signal and directions have been solid 99% of the time, and it quickly recovers and re-routes. I love the map interface. It does have the problem of being a several hundred yards off, but knowing this, you adjust, and I'm not sure if this problem is unique only to TomTom.

My biggest complaint is that as a business traveler, there are too many addresses missing of places that are populated and have been there for years. Because of this, I'm going to start looking at other GPS devices. If they would have more addresses, I would stick with them for sure. I've rented Avis Assist and it has always had the addresses, so this makes me believe TomTom can do better. I'll give TomTom one more chance when the 2006 maps come out. Hopefully they're listening.

I've been really trying to like this package, using it now for close to five months. In that time I've logged well north of 8,000 road miles.

I'm running it on a T-Mobile MDA with a BT338 Bluetooth GPS.

Installation originally was a royal PITA - the installer on the first CD did not work at all. I finally managed to work around this using their "patch" on their web page, and got both the application and maps (along with a voice) loaded on my SD card.

Pairing the BT GPS was not obvious either in terms of setup, but once I had that figured out, it worked.

The good:

1. It routes nicely most of the time and the instructions work. It'd be nice to have the program actually use voice generation if its available (e.g. Microsoft Voice Command is loaded) so that it speaks the actual names of streets and such, but I can live with "Turn left" - most of the time. Where does it screw you? When you come to a complex intersection and there's more than one "left!" Now you have to look at the screen - not too cool when you're driving.

2. The "touch anywhere to get the manu" is good.

3. MOST of the time, you can hit the END key on the phone and get the main top screen back, while leaving the application running. This is useful - when it works. Inexplicably, sometimes TT has "Taken over" and there's no way out except to quit the application. I've been unable to figure out WHAT makes it do that.....

4. IF a call comes in, TT mutes and you can take it, but it remains running. I like this - a lot. It then unmutes when your call is over, and back you go.

5. You can operate it without using the stylus, touching the screen, just like it should be. Excellent.

Ok, so what's not to like? Unfortunately, the maps.

The maps in this product are SEVERELY out of date. For instance, there's a section of US-31 in South Alabama that I travel from time to time. TT insists that IT IS NOT THERE AT ALL. This is not a new road - it hasn't been changed in the 5 years I've lived in this area. The application simply freaks out and tries to route you down all sorts of little streets in this area, which is not cool. If you were coming into this area without knowing this, you'd get SEVERELY lost listening to the device - when the right thing to do is just keep driving...

Likewise, there are multiple pieces of roads in SC, north of Dothan AL and elsewhere that I also know haven't been added in the last couple of years, yet they too are simply "not there" or are WAY off. And these are not small secondary streets either - we're talking MAJOR throughways.

There are also significant errors in some parts of the US that haven't been updated in TWENTY YEARS. For instance, Northern Michigan near Traverse City. I attempted (foolishly) to run a route to a hotel there that's been there since I was attending school up there in 1981 - TT insisted that the destination address was more than TWENTY MILES from where I knew it was. The bad news is that this corrupted its idea of "best route" into the general area; good thing I knew better than to follow it or I would have been HOPELESSLY lost. Again - this is not a "new" address - its a hotel I stayed at in 1980! Good thing I knew where I was going.....

Essentially anything built in the last 5 years is asking for TT to claim that the address itself does not exist and default to a "range". That's ok in urban areas and will usually get you reasonably close. In rural areas the "range" might be 5 - or more - miles away. A horse ranch in Seiverville TN that I tried to route to - established in the 1980s - was one of these; TT had absolutely no clue where it was in terms of address and tried to take me down what was DEFINITELY the wrong road, but when driving there magically the streets were all on the map! Huh?

As for the POC database, that's at least as bad, if one looks at completeness. How about this? Select SouthEast, then try to route a route to the POC called "Walt Disney World" under "Amusement Parks." Do 'ya think TT ought to know how to get THERE? Does it get any bigger than that? Guess what - it doesn't have it in the list! Nor does it have MGM Studios listed. But "Walt Disney Animal Kingdom" is, and so is Epcot. Tell me how that makes sense - please? Local stuff is even worse - of the larger restaurants around here that I know have been here since at least 2001 (when I moved here) at least half are missing. How does TT decide what to include and what not? Who knows.

There appears to be NO way to get updates to the maps. At all. TomTom's web site is completely silent about updates to software or map databases, and their "online" service offers city-by-city add-on maps, but are they more current? No way to know - and I'm not about to buy one-at-a-time to find out either - never mind the expense. How about accurate maps in the first place?

Other complaints:

The software doesn't know how to read contacts off the PDA/phone. This is such a simple thing that you'd think they'd have it in there - but its not. Dumb.

There's no good way to route ON a certain street. You can set ONE (and only one) "waypoint", but you can't tell the software "Use Route 90". This sucks if you know what road you'd like to be used for a specific part of your route, but want the software to handle the rest. Attempting to approximate this using the waypoint feature usually leads to really BIZARRE routings.....

"Shortest" is a waste of time. It'll be "shortest" all right - right down every residential street between where you are and where you want to go. "Fastest" is the only reasonable route option to use, unless you want one of the specialty ones (bicycling?! Ok, I guess that makes sense)

Time to destination is stupidly off on many non-freeways. Basically, it appears that the software thinks of everything off-freeway as being 25mph or somesuch! I've had it claim that a 50 mile drive on surface highways, all of which is a 55 or 65mph zone with the exception of a few small "one light" towns where you have to slow down for a couple of miles, is a 2+ hour trip. Balderdash. It appears that the "speed class" on any road that has a slow zone in it is set - for the entire duration - as that slower speed. This is a major botch and makes time prediction for anything other than freeway driving rediculously wrong. Freeway speed zoning appears to be wrong too, but less badly - it sure isn't 70mph through all the 70mph states.....

No automatic day/night palette switching. This one is so easy I'm shocked, to be honest. Oh well; a few clicks does it.

The software is a total CPU pig, to the point that it blows up VoiceCommand if called while its running. This means you can't initiate a voice call while TT is operating on the PPC, as there aren't enough cycles left on the CPU. Granted, this may be just "reality" on the MDA, as its not a terribly powerful machine - but it still is a bummer.

The software allows you to load as many "regional" maps as you'd like. The stupidity of this, however, is that you can't route inter-region. Dumber! So you have to switch to "Major Roads of America", and then switch to your destination region and recompute when you enter it. That I can live with, but I won't tell you I like it - to be honest, I think it kinda sucks. 2GB MiniSD cards are available, and as such you can load the whole map store on ONE card - why not allow seamless navigation as an option?

Beware their copy protection system. Their "code" requires an online connection to register the software, and there are only TWO codes available - ever - which must be acquired six months apart from each other. God help you if your device breaks outside of that range - you've got a box full of worthless CDs.

A support request when I was attempting to get the software to load was ignored. I figured it out on my own - several days later - without a response. Don't expect help from the company, because you won't get it.

I didn't attempt to use the "PLUS" services because, quite honestly, if you can't provide accurate maps - why would I buy add-on services that are likely no more accurate?

I bought this because TT is thought of as the "leader" in the marketplace.

The user interface is nice, the product works, but the map inaccuracies, protection scheme and complete lack of customer support leave me recommending against it and giving it only ONE star.

Nice try TomTom.

I finally got this working with my Holux GpsSlim236, but it was a major pain in the ... While I was waiting I downloaded Mapopolis and some demo maps. I think I like Mapopolis better .. here is why.

- the obvious pain in the ... getting TomTom working with my GPS .
- Electronic registration process. you have to be online to start using this product.
- Mapopolis worked perfectly the first time
- pricing model .. mapopolis you pay for maps only .. as you need them.
- they use different map database. TomTom does not have wala drive, Oceanside, ca, or the CA-56 going all the way through, so it is at least three years old for the Southern California area. Plus in online reviews the map database the TomTom uses does not have a good reputation.
- Mapopolis uses a computer voice and reads the names of the streets to you .. "take a slight right turn onto the I-5", while TomTom only has canned phrases like "turn right onto the highway". So you have to watch the screen on TomTom to make sure you are turning on the right street. Plus the voice instructions are just way better on Mapopolis for the finer points like "merging" and "slight right".
- TomTom does have the 3-d view, but in retrospect it's not that big of deal. With Mapopolis's better voice you don't look at the map anyway. Top-down shows POI's better.
- Tom-Tom does have better finger-click navigation .. I will give them that. Mapopolis you really need a stylus. Tom-Tom may also have better advanced features .. but I am not sure because I have not used them yet.

I really wanted to like the TomTom Navigator 5.

The GPS itself is tiny, well-designed, and very sensitive. It worked fine from down in a underdash cupholder or in the glove compartment.

The interface is attractive and easy to navigate. The voice prompts are clear and loud.

The installation on a Mac was problematic. Search on TomTom OSX for details, but suffice it to say that the installer included on the CDs simply doesn't work and a new one must be downloaded. Once past that, it ran fine on my Treo 700p.

Unfortunately there is one fatal flaw - the map database. In using the Navigator in both California and North Carolina, the maps regularly had misnamed streets, exits referred to by numbers where there were none, and directions that lacked critical information like heading (i.e. take the 101 instead of take 101N when approaching a complex interchange).

Worse, the company seems to be actively hostile to updating these maps. If you go to the TomTom site, you can purchase maps on a city-by-city basis. Are they newer than the ones that came with your unit? Who knows? TomTom lists no version info and seems to expect you to buy and cross your fingers.

There were just too many errors that I saw while traveling in areas that I'm familiar with to trust the TomTom maps for any unfamiliar territory. Everything else is great, but the whole point of a GPS is accurate navigation. And sadly, that's where the TomTom Navigator fails.

A fine product in use, but with an Achilles heel that should make any heavy, business, user avoid it like the plague.

Treos break and get replaced, and if you're a heavy business traveler, this will happen probably once or twice a year. TomTom apparently doesn't realize this, since Navigator 5 allows you to activate it exactly twice (on your original, and one replacement Treo), before it refuses to activate again. You'd think they'd be bright enough to cross-reference w/ the Treo device's phone number, or something along those lines, to realize that you are the very same person who paid good money for, and activated, the software previously. Instead, it just refuses to work.

If you then follow the instructions from their Web site to resolve activation problems, you are eventually led to a screen which, while labeled Step 1 (of 3), is a broken Web page from which you can accomplish nothing.

Shameful.

My wife got it new from Amazon in early December 2005. It worked okay for about two weeks (after quite unpleasant installation process) with Palm T3. The GPS unit then stopped working. It could not be turned on even it's fully charged.

I filed the report on tomtom website three times and got no responses other than automatically generated ones. I was able to find the "support" phone number on its website on Jan 05, 2005, but that is a non-working phone number. I cannot find the phone number this time.

I can understand that some products are defects but I expect the manufacturers to stand behind their products and provide replacement or repairments free of charge promptly. Therefore I'm not recommending this product.

After 3 days I was finally able to ger the activation code.
But no reply to my email from support...
Now it works fine and I like it, but the user interface is not as intuitive but I can get used to it.

The fact that these guys do not have a live support line is extremely disappointing and risky in my own opinion.
Also the restriction on the activation on a specific device vs. a certain user is also too much in my opinion.

I would give the product 4 starts for the software and 1 star for support, activation and other "weird" policies...

I agree that the product is not bad overall, except for several glaring problems - routing frequently is not the fastest, with surface streets favored over nearby highways, estimated times of arrival are far off, and several times the software has tried to get me to turn the wrong way down one way streets.

It's the customer service that's a problem, however. I'm not sure if TomTom is trying to amass a telephone database since calls to their technical support only yield a promise that someone will call you back within 24 hours. Of course, as all too many others have found out, this is a fallacy - they don't call back at all.

So take the product for what it's worth - a cheaper than Garmin solution if you already own a PDA, and without any appreciable customer support. If don't already own a PDA, I'd go with something else.