James's Weblog

For the Christmas before my dad passed away, I bought him a Bluetooth GPS receiver and the Palm OS version of TomTom Navigator for him to use with his Treo 650. I’ve started using it myself on my Treo during the past few weeks.

Things I don’t like:

• TomTom’s restrictive copy “protection” scheme. Had I realized how draconian it is, I probably would never have bought their software. They require software activation, and the software can be activated at most twice. To show just how ridiculous their policies are, from their “I am having trouble activating a second hand TomTom Navigator” knowledge base article:

  Second hand TomTom Navigator products are likely to have already been activated once or more by the first buyer and the product code may therefore no longer be valid. For this reason we advise our customers not to purchase TomTom Navigator second hand. If you have already purchased a second hand TomTom Navigator product and cannot activate the software, we suggest you return it to the seller.

  In other words, they’re unwilling to help you, and you’re screwed. I’m somewhat tempted to call them to complain that the previous owner was my dad and that they’re a bunch of insensitive jerks.

  I downloaded a crack off the Internet instead.

• Doesn’t automatically switch between day and night colors. The day colors are too bright at night, and the subdued day colors are too hard to see in the sunlight. At least hitting the “C” key quickly and easily switches between the two.

• No verbosity control. The thing is a chatterbox sometimes, saying things such as, “Turn right, then turn left. Left turn ahead. Turn left.” within the span of seconds.

• Some of its directions are misleading. TomTom often gives verbal directions like “turn right, then turn left” even though the left turn is a half mile away. I’d rather it didn’t mention the second turn at all until getting closer to it or if it said, “turn right, then stay in the left lane.”

• Menus are permanently cluttered with buttons that require paid service. I have no intention of ever paying for traffic or weather service, but they’re always listed in the menu choices, and I’m forced to wade through them. Reducing options in a software application that might be used while driving (despite their warnings against it) would be good.

• It uses strange defaults when restarted. When the software starts up and tires to retrieve the current location from the GPS receiver, it initially displays the “Home” location rather than from the last known location. It’s disorienting and weird. And once it does obtain the current location, TomTom Navigator always wastes time attempting to navigate to the last destination, even if you previously cleared the route or even if you already arrived there.

• It doesn’t tell you the name of the street you’re currently on. Admittedly that’s not so important if you’re just blindly following the navigation directions, but it’s something I’d like to know.

• It formats addresses as “Fake Street 123” instead of as “123 Fake Street”. There’s an option in the preferences to put house numbers first, but I can’t tell what it affects.

• You can save addresses to a special “Favorites” list and give them meaningful names. For example, you can save “742 Evergreen Terrace” (er, “Evergreen Terrace 742”) as “The Simpsons’ house”. However, once aliased, you can’t retrieve the actual address. Want to tell someone else where “The Simpsons’ house” is? Too bad.

• Incapable of learning. There’s no way to teach it about roads it’s not aware of, and worse, there’s no way to teach it about permanently blocked roads. Consequently, it will forever get the directions to my house wrong, because I live in a gated community, and TomTom (like most online mapping services) thinks there’s an accessible entrance into it where there isn’t.

• Inconsistent time formats. When showing the amount of time to the next turn, sometimes it says “0:15 hrs” to mean 15 minutes. Sometimes it shows “9.50 min” to mean 9 minutes, 50 seconds. And yes, I told it to use U.S. formats.

• Blinking speed indicator. If you choose to show your current speed, when the software thinks you’re speeding, it displays your speed in blinking red text. This is annoying because the speed limit can be higher than it thinks it is, the blinking red text is annoying and distracting, and because it’s blinking, by the time I look at it, the text is often gone.

• Its “point-of-interest” system is hard to use. If you search for nearby businesses, the list of search results shows you how far away they are but not where they are. Selecting an item from the list automatically navigates to it rather than giving you more information first, and if the selected item turns out not to be the one you wanted, you need to perform the search all over again. Oh, and there is no point-of-interest category for supermarket/market/groceries.

That said, the TomTom Navigator software does look very nice and have a good feature-set, though I wish its features were more easily accessible.