Customer Reviews

TomTom Navigator 5 System with Maps of the US and Canada for Compatible PDAs

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Not only does the GPS mapping work well, it is designed for ease of use and, in some instances, better than GPS units I've seen installed in other cars for many times the price!

Getting up and running was somewhat frustrating as the product code needed to activate the item was not included in the box. In fact the documentation provided is somewhat wanting but sufficient. However I emailed TomTom's customer support from their website and they got me going in no time.

Since then, I've had four other requests/issues that they solved very quickly through their online support. Now that that is all behind me, I couldn't be happier with the product or the way it works. The map appears to be about 1-2 years old (didn't have a local golf course that opened recently nor a recently rerouted road), but they promise to have updated maps soon.

Be warned--no mounting device comes with the packaging. You have to buy this separately.

I have tried several in car navigation systems and this seems just good. Great for frequent travler as all I need to bring is the small bluetooth GPS unit.

I received my shrink-wrapped, brand-spanking new TomTom Bluetooth package from Amazon and was really looking forward to using it. Before being able to use the software on your Pocket PC, however, you have to activate it using the product code in the package. This is done on-line. Unfortunately, when I entered my product code, thier web site informed me that my supposedly brand new software package had already been activated and assigned to two different Pocket PCs!

So I'm left with a totally useless $270 stack of CDs. I e-mailed thier tech support, which told me they would respond in a few days. It was then, after Googling for info, I began to realize that thier tech support is apparently second to none in terms of poor quality and sluggish responsiveness. I'm already beginning to regret this purchase 12 hours after receiving it.

I am willing to bet they had a problem with thier packaging procedures and put the same product code in multiple boxes. Apparently two other people got my product code, as evidenced by the other activation codes.

I would give them only 1 star instead of 2, but I have heard such good things about thier software...once it's installed. I am hoping they respond within a decent time frame, otherwise it's off the RMA page.
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UPDATE: 3 days later after getting no response, I called TomTom at the number listed on thier site. Got an operator who said they would respond within 24 hours. 2 hours later I received an e-mail asking me to PROVE I really bought the product, so I had to fax my receipt, a copy of the product card, and a copy of the 1st CD to them. An hour later I received a new product code via e-mail that worked the first time. Bottom, line - 5 hours after I called them I was back in business.

If you can get past the activation and tech support hurdles, it's a great product.

The receiver has very good sensitivity and locks on faster than any I have used before. The performance of the receiver sitting in my pocket on the lower deck of a steel bridge is better than my old Garmin GPS V with an external antenna. I had my doubts about using a receiver without an external antenna connection, but now that I've tried this one I don't think it's an issue and more and I'll be happy not to have to run the wire out the door.

The maps cover very large areas, so although you do need to select the right map that's not something you have to do often. You can see the 'granularity' in the maps, the corners aren't smooth but instead are made of obvious segments, so it could be just a tiny bit pretier. The flip side is that I've got the whole of the west, with the exception of Alaska, on a 512Mb SD card, I expect you can get the whole country including Canada and Hawaii on a 1Gb card.

The software is fairly easy to use, as an engineer I have a tendancy to expect that I should only have to read the manual if someone hasn't done their job properly, it wasn't necessary to read the manual to get home and to a few experimental destinations. Rerouting is very fast, but that's partly a function of the Dell x51v it's running on. The voice directions are particularly well timed, a human navigator would be unlikely to drop them in as well.

During routing I would often like to see the road further ahead, but then thus far I haven't been on any thousand mile trips, but it seems to show only a couple of miles and I like the Garmin way of showing the map to the next waypoint. There are pros and cons, this is more the way of the Magelan devices.

I took quite a few deliberate wrong turns and in each case the reroute was completed before I reached the next block. The rerouting did not exhibit an unreasonable attachment to the original route, unlike some other software I've used it didn't keep telling me to do a U-turn.

There were two minor irritations with the installation, the first is that you need to install the maps one at a time and I kept having to swap disks, they should have allowed me to choose a set of maps and then just swap disks once.

The on-line registration just gave me a blank screen, I don't know if this was caused by a firewall or whether they rely on some aspect of Java or ActiveX which my spyware and malware protection software doesn't allow. Once the software was installed on the PDA it did a perfectly good job of enabling the maps with minimal fuss.

I'm happy with this choice of hardware and software, if that changes I'll update the review.

[update after a 875 mile, 15 hour trip, including stops]

First, the routing is pretty good. The trip was from Alameda, CA to Port Angeles, WA. The route was found fast and looked good, so off we went. But there was a shock, departure at 0600, predicted arrival 0030 or thereabouts. What? Erm, 18 hours of freeway... worst case bad day 50mph... 900 miles. No way! In the end it was 14 hours of driving. The last stretch was supposed to take me three hours and took maybe one and a quarter. The route was basically I880, I980, I580, I80, I505, I5, WA SR16, WA SR3, US101. I'm pretty sure that last bit after I5 was wrong, it should have just taken US101 from Olympia and would have shortened the trip as well as avoiding a lot of traffic.

Is that fair? Yes. US101 is a major road, the SR16 and SR3 sections are not. I think all this is based in bad road speed settings and I don't know how to change them, if I can.

Three years ago Garmin programmed the GPS V and, other than stops and accidents, I've never seen it off by more than a few percent on longish trips. A few minutes per hour. So maybe on the trip today it would have been out by 30 minutes. Not four hours!

The scaling of the display and the automatic zoom needs some work. On my 624MHz Dell PDA it all looks very pretty, but at 70mph the section of road the display shows is far too small, there's no significant forewarning and there's nothing to maintain your situational awareness. One of the things I like about having a GPS is that you can always see where you are in the grand scheme of things, but by continuously zooming back to the small area display the Navigator 5 software denies you this view. If I select a larger scale then the software should accept that I know what I'm doing and give it to me.

The 3D view is more of a gimic than a tool most of the time, the regular map view shows maybe three times as much road. I think the 3D view is most use to people who can't look at a map and work out what the world must look like.

What would be nice would be an overhead map you could lock to a 5,10,15,25,50 miles scale with a zoom to the 3D view at junctions. There should, perhaps be an option to display just a centered map, which I think is all MS Pocket Streets and Trips will allow (no routing etc in that), so that you can see how you are doing on your route. The bad choice of fixed scale together with the bad predictions has given me an unnecessarily stressful day filled with dead reckoning calculations and attempts to zoom the map whiles driving (bad idea but that '-' key was right there). I accidentally found that taping the bottom right of the screen shows the whole route, but for a thousand mile drive that was a bit too small, and no zoom controls. There are map options which will allow you to view your trip at an appropriate scale, but that involves draging and zooming the map yourself. Hopefully Tomtom will address this?

I could be tempted to try another software package.

The GPS receiver was flawless again, solid lock all day, the signal strength always showed maximum. It's a very good receiver and I have had no Bluetooth issues what so ever.