TomTom Navigator 5 Software with Maps of North America for compatible PDAs with Bluetooth

by TomTom

Product Details

• Item Weight: 1 pounds
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Shipping: Currently, item can be shipped only within the U.S.
• ASIN: B0009PD3PA
• Item model number: 1C90.085
• Average Customer Review: 2.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (15 customer reviews)

Product Description

Amazon.com Product Description

The TomTom Navigator 5 (Software Only, US) is compatible with many of the leading Bluetooth-enabled PDA devices, including selected models from Palm, Sony, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, T-Mobile, and more. With Navigator 5 you can turn your PDA into a leading navigation tool that gives you clear and accurate spoken-word instructions and 3D maps that lead you from door-to-door in your travels. The software is loaded with maps of the United States and offers convenient itinerary planning features that allow you to plan routes to multiple destinations and add stopping points along the way.

Navigator 5 makes navigating the roadways as easy as it gets. You can have the option of choosing the quickest routes, the routes with the shortest distance to travel, or ones that avoid toll roads. The software contact navigation lets you navigate directly from your PDA address book, and you can even review the calculated route before you actually start driving.

A touch-screen operation and intuitive interface simplifies your navigation tasks, while the interface's dynamic status bar can be customized for optimal readability.Other features include useful onscreen tips that will guide you through Navigator 5's many options; multi-lingual functionality that offers voice instructions in more than 30 languages, in both male and female voices, and a user interface that includes 18 languages; millions of points of interest, such as parking, gas stations, hotels, and restaurants; and a compass mode that displays a compass on screen for even more orientation while driving.

Note: See Technical Specifications for full list of compatible PDA devices.

What's in the Box
CD-ROM set, installation poster, quick start guide, and product code card.

Product Description

TomTom (1C90.085) TomTom Navigator 5 Software

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

44 of 46 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars The best PDA solution, despite flaws in maps and software, December 5, 2005

By 

Chris (Alameda, CA, United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: TomTom Navigator 5 Software with Maps of North America for compatible PDAs with Bluetooth (Electronics)

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 ›

23 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Okay product. Contemptuous product support., April 1, 2006

By 

Jerry Saperstein (Evanston, IL USA) - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: TomTom Navigator 5 Software with Maps of North America for compatible PDAs with Bluetooth (Electronics)

Essentially once TomTom has your money they're finished with you . . . until you want to spend more money with them.

The product is okay. The map data is from TeleAtlas, a vendor to many of the map software producers. What makes TomTom different is its GUI (Graphic User Interface) that the user interacts with. It really is a work of art most of the time. The map presentations are rich and may be viewed as 3D or 2D. The planning interface is icon driven and easy-to-use. Unfortunately TomTom really didn't think it all the way through.

There are several irritants, all of which vie for first place. One is that TomTom doesn't give you the option of using its maps without a GPS. There are many instances where I know where I am begining from and going to and I don't need a GPS fix. TomTom ignores such desires and annoyingly keeps prompting for you to start your Bluetooth connection. There is one mode that you can use to plan a route without a GPS and it simply doesn't work very well, often informing you that TomTom can't route you from a point beginning on an interstate to another point further along the same highway. That's just plain dumb. This is a mapping application. If I want to use these expensive maps for walking directions without a GPS, I should be able to. TomTom certainly doesn't think so.

Another irritant is the documentation. Probably in an effort to make TomTom appealing to the casual user, the documentation is dog simple . . . and often wrong. It appears that they didn't update the documentation to the newest version.

Although you can load maps by region, TomTom makes no allowance for travelling from one region to another. You have to calculate your route to the ending point within one region and then begin it anew in the next region. Again, this strikes me as a silly omission. If you are in Wisconsin, which is one region, and drive to Minnesota, which is in another, you have to create two routes. Not bright.

There are a number of idiosyncracies, anomalies and bugs that drive me up a wall. However, overall, TomTom is still better than the competition. It computes routes quickly (when it is capable of figuring a route at all). Annoying, however, it tends to prefer expressways, regardless of your preferences. In a major metro area laced with expressways going in all directions, this can create some incredibly convoluted - and ridiculous - routes. Creating alternative and more logical routes is possible, but tedious.

The worst part of the TomTom experience is its customer support. Well, perhaps support is the wrong word for it. I encountered two problems installing the software. It was obviously that the tech support person was clueless and was simply guessing and grasping at straws. (I had resolved the issues before the rep called and already knew what the problem was.) The TomTom rep didn't listen, kept interrupting and when it was pointed out that he was contradicting the manual, he just kept moving. (The manual in at least one instance was correct and the rep wrong.)

The TomTom packaging itself arrived in broken condition. The rep denied it was their packaging, claiming that I must have bought a third-party repackaged product. Talk about insulting: I have the package in front of me with the TomTom labels, the whole works and this guy is telling me that my lying eyes are deceiving me?

A fax to TomTom management about my experiences has gone unanswered more than a week later.

TomTom is riding high right now but I suspect in a couple of years as competitors introduce better products with better support that TomTom will be history. It won't be the first company that offered a good-enough product without support and possesing contempt for its customers to disappear and it won't be the last.

I know that if I find a marginally better product with adequate support, I'd abandon TomTom in a flash.

Jerry

22 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Map Activation? For a product I purchased?, January 5, 2006

By 

J. Bougiamas "booyia" (Woodside, NY USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: TomTom Navigator 5 Software with Maps of North America for compatible PDAs with Bluetooth (Electronics)

The TomTom Navigator is a nice enough device, until you get to the Maps activation. The Maps activation? Why should I have to activate my maps if I have paid for the product? Good question, well, I activated these maps on one PDA, and within 2 weeks my PDA died and I had to obtain warranty service. Well, I decided that I would upgrade to a new device and then sell my old device when I got it back from the manufacturers (I tend to switch my PDA every 3-4 months anyway).

So I installed the maps on the new device and it asked me to activate. OK, I figure...no problem, I will be able to activate it 1...2...3 because after all, only I have the activation card/code. No such luck, TomTom wants PROOF that I have brought a new device? what kind of nonsense is that? What if I lost my PDA in 2-3 months? What if I'm a nut who likes to change PDA's every 3-4 months? What, you mean I have to show you proof that I switched? Isn't the fact that I have the activation card proof enough? I don't know too many people who pay $269 for a product and let other people use the activation codes.

Avoid them at all costs. You will regret your purchase if you change devices frequently.

One other problem with this product...out of the box it is not 100% compatible with Windows Mobile 5 devices (most of the new Axims are WM5. You really have to break your back to install on these devices.

Avoid.