Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

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 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. But to be fair, most of it works well. And it is very pretty. Overall I haven't seen a better solution.

After six months I still haven't seen a better software solution. For me, until there's a significant improvement in the general state of the GPS software market, this is about as good a solution as any if you already own a PDA. But the Garmin integrated units do a lot more than the Tomtom systems and with better routing, POI and navigation features.

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

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.

The is a great product. It works beautifully with my Dell Axim x51v and a third party Bluetooth GPS locator. One of the best things about the TomTom Navigator 5 is that you can get real-time traffic updates through a bluetooth cell phone. It will even route you around traffic problems. To me real-tim traffic updates were on important factor in my decision and this one seems to have the best traffic system on the market. While TomTom Traffic is free (at least for now) you will need to pay for a decent cell phone data plan. I use Cingular and pay $20 a month for unlimited data.

On the downside, I must tell you that it takes lots of patience to install the software. And, it takes near saint-like patience to make it work with a cell phone. (I would never have been able to do it if it were not for the instructions found on sites like Aximsite.com) I nearly gave up. But, it was worth the trouble.

I am in sales and the TomTom Navigator 5 makes life so much easier. If you are considering a PDA, this makes more sense to me than buying a GPS-only device.

I purchased Navigator 5 after a miserable experience with DeLorme Street Atlas 2005. Although Navigator cost me about three times what I paid for Street Atlas, I'm about 10 times happier. This is an excellent product, and you can really tell that the designers put a lot of thought and effort into it. It's fast, the 3D view is wonderful, the directions have been accurate, and there are lots of extra features like being able to avoid toll roads, integration with the Palm's address book, and other nice bonuses like that.

Of course, there are a few things I don't like. The voice prompts can be a little repetitive, for example. It often tells me three times times that I need to turn right ahead, and then it will tell me again to turn right AS I'M TURNING. Also, the address locator has to know the city. This can cause problems if you're in an urban location where all the towns run into each other and you know you're trying to get to an intersection nearby but you just don't know the town it's in. Also, installation on the Mac is buggy. I tried many times and read all the tips on the net, but eventually I had to find a Windows machine to install Navigator on my Palm. After that, everything was working fine and I was able to upload maps to the Palm from my Mac.

In short, it's an excellent piece of software, so don't get turned off by the price. It's more expensive than Mapopolis or Street Atlas, but you get what you pay for.

There are a few excellent and detailed reviews already posted here, so I'll keep it short.

My GPS setup includes PalmOne Treo 650, TomTom Navigator 5 and Holux GPSlim 236 Bluetooth receiver. I live in a big city (Toronto), so I often had to use Google Maps to plan my trips from point A to point B.

TomTom calculates most routes in a matter of seconds and gets me where I want fast. If I miss a turn (and this happened a lot during the first week of use), it would either find an alternative route or ask me to make a U-turn when possible.

I've been using it for about a month now and, overall, I'm very happy. One issue I had with it is that it asked me to make a left turn at a few intersections with "No Left Turn" signs. I was actually signalling and getting ready to turn then noticing the sign at the last minute, so keep your head up and don't put all your faith into the software.

And of course, it doesn't take the traffic into consideration when figuring out your trip (unless you signed up for the optional TomTom traffic reports), so the TomTom-recommended route is not always the best one.

Despite these minor flaws, it is a great product. I am impressed with the detailed maps, application speed and the ability to get wherever I want fast, without getting lost in a big city. Navigator 5 is a good investment. You won't be disappointed.

TomTom Software Review!
Pros: Being able to have it integrated on the Smart Phone or PDA.
Cons: Inaccurate Maps (we are talking miles not feet!), Difficult of use, cumbersome menus, lack of POI's, Wrong POI locations, crashes often and the list goes on....

Review:
This software should be labeled a beta software until the company works out all its problems, it should be never compared to Garmin or Magellan, I owned both and it does not even come close.
I will start with the pros since it will take the least time to mention.

Pros: Convenience of having a Navigation loaded on your phone, the GPS receiver can be left in the vehicle except when you are hiking for example.

Cons:
Maps:
The inaccuracy of the Maps are incredible and can lead you to a wrong place or miss a free way exit.
Maps are out dated; it did not show streets that have been updated on all map search engines 18 month prior.
You can not click and pan the maps to see the route ahead while on route.
Crashes often, about once every 2~3 days.
You would expect to be able to easily access your address book or contacts to navigate to a saved address; right? Not with TomTom, you have to exit the application and open another application called tomtom contacts there you can select a name and from the pull down click on navigate to address, it would then open the main navi software and show you the route, Oh but if for some reason you did not have your satellite locked yet, then you will have to exit out and do the same thing all over again! I think you agree that this is a bit cumbersome.
Sync
It gives data base errors of "WARNING: Possible database overwrite problem....", after contacting the customer service they said that it is a known problem! And nothing can be done???!!! So now every time I sync I have to ignore the warning message so other problems might go unnoticed thanks to the smart developers at TomTom.
POI (Points of Interest):
Again incomplete, inaccurate and difficult to use. For example if you are looking for a certain store and the search returns 6 and let us say the first 3 are approximately 3mi from where you are, you will not be able to select each one to further know more info - all you can do is pick one to get the directions to.
SD card:
Every time you insert the SD card into your PDA, the TomTom application will have start, and No, this is not an option you can turn off.
Customer Service:
Not very helpful, not knowledgeable about their products or offers and take long time to answer questions or concerns.

I am disappointed at the product which could have been an incredible for the convenience, I hope that the people involved in making decisions for the company go out and buy some different Navigation units and see how they can improve their product.

Thanks for your time reading my review!

I spent about a month online reading reviews, talking to friends and browsing websites researching routing software. Originally I was going to start out with an AAA map guides that I saw in Staples until I read the fine print which stated it would not work on the Treo 650 with Bluetooth. After research Delorme and a few others I decided on Mapopolis. Mapopolis gives you a 9 day trial period. The maps where dead on every time I used them and the POI's (Points of Interest) where up to date and extremely easy to use. The Mapopolis POI's just give you a dot on the moving maps while Tomtom uses a 24X24 BMP file so you can get a companies logo such as Dunkin Donuts or McDonalds. Mapopolis initially gave me trouble as they suggested loading as much as you can into the main memory. I drive all over Massachusetts on a daily basis so I needed a lot of maps. Mapopolis maps are set up on a county basis and you download them for each county. This insures you will also be using the latest most up to date POI's and streets. One of the reasons I had planned to go with Mapopolis over Tomtom was the price was cheaper and Tomtom limits you to two installs and then you need to buy everything over again to re-activate it. The initial activation is not too difficult, at least in my case it wasn't. Once you install the maps on your device you are asked to go on the Internet. The site listed never seemed to work so I merely went to [...] and entered the number from my CD, then the number from my copy of Tomtom on my Treo and it gave me a third number which I entered on the device to activate it. This took all of about five minutes. Once I had Tomtom running it took seconds to configure for my Holux GPS and I loved the product instantly! The maps and displays give exactly what you need to know and are very readable even on a small screen. The prompts are easy to hear even in a noisy car. One of my most loved features is the near instant auto re-routes on even across state trips. I have my maps and most of the program loaded on the SD card and was concerned with speed. Mapopolis seemed to take a good while to calculate routes especially once I moved them to my SD card. Mapopolis was very stable and quick and if I had to complain about anything it would be the maps are slightly dated and the POI's only seem to cover about 15-20% of the places Mapopolis came with. The one saving grace here is that they allow you to add in categories of POI's and it is fairly easy to add a `single' POI at a time from Tomtom's interface. Unfortunately if you wanted to add all the Hess gas stations or all the Staples in your state you are going to be clicking and typing a lot on your Palm. Another fault with the POI's is Mapopolis allowed you to bring up information on POI simply by tapping the POI on the screen, when you tap Tomtom's screen you get to the configuration menu's. After having this almost two years I have yet to see a single update from Tomtom. It is plagued with problems about "not enough dbcache" to run once in a while and requires removing the battery after running cleanup software. Tomtom acknowledged this in a few emails but never addressed it. Also, the maps have not had a single update either. On the Massachusetts Turnpike it trys to use several maintenance area's as entrance ways which are blocked to the public.

As an update a few years later, TomTom has yet to provide a single software update and an update for the Maps would cost more than what I spent on it. This version also has known memory issues which take several minutes to clear up when used infrequently.

would give this company zero starts but it is not a choice. ABSOLUTELY NO CUSTOMER SUPPORT

I have owned the TomTom Navigator 5 for almost a year now. While the program is well thought out and provides a good function, it does not work well with my Tungsten T5. I have contacted customer service 4 times now and they have always been helpful in trying to fix my issues (listed below), but to no avail.

Some of the issues I have had:

Any time the software has to redirect or think, it locks up. If I stay on the original planned route, it sometimes works properly...

In a 30 minute trip from Orange County to Long Beach, I had to pull over 7 times to reset my device after the software locked up.

Voices lock up mid sentence giving a stuttering sound until you are able to pull your car over to reset the device.

In a 20 minute trip from San Francisco to Oakland the device locked up 5 times. I finally gave up and called a friend to guide me.

Bear in mind, I have had no problems with my T5 in the 1.5 years of ownership...it is only with this software. Customer service has acknowledged the problems and given solutions that have solved little to nothing.

In summary, it's not worth spending the money to have to print out Mapquest directions to have when the device crashes...stick with Mapquest.