Advice please on TomTom sat navs

coolsteel

Hi am thinking about buying a tom tom sat nav but have looked at some reviews and the ones i have seen are not to complementary. So i thought id seek your opinions on Tom Tom sat navs.
Thanks in advance
:cool:

System

I have a TomTom GO530 which I think is an excellent device.

Easy to use, fast response and lots of features.

TomTom are not the cheapest Sat Nav, but they are one of the best.

The Gadget Show did a test on Sat Navs a while back - see : http://fwd.five.tv/gadget-show/bestbuys/sat-nav

kwikbreaks

You're just going to get a load of useless and contradictory replies to this question.

I'll start the ball rolling..

I've had TomTom on a Windows mobile phone and it was useless - kept hanging - almost certainly that was Windows mobile.

I've had two standalaone TomTom units and both have been fine other than the occasional tendency to cut off a corner and take you along a farm track to do so. I imagine others probably do the same thing.

I currently have an XL Live with IQ routes (£124 iirc from Amazon). The Live traffic data comes free for the first year. I've only had it a couple of months but that feature saved me what would have been a 2hour or more screwup getting to work. As I'm an IT contractor that saving alone went a long way towards paying for it.

Updating the maps is expensive although you do get free minor user-created updates.

Knarf44

Have you visited the SimpleSatNav website? Lots of advice there about TTs and others.

PhylPho

Sadly, it seems satnavs are as prone to good 'uns / bad 'uns as anything else. TomTom is no different. We bought one from Halfords, returned it after a month of uselessness, were given a replacement, and that one worked fine. However. . .

TomTom's software people do seem to have the skills of a dead goldfish: I've lost track, over the years, of how many times the much-vaunted 'TomTom Home' service has screwed updates, maps, settings, and everything else.

Nor is the maps service reliable: a long-distance route I regularly use has had new roundabouts on it these past three years, but TomTom still has no idea they're there, despite umpteen user reports about them.

Amongst many continuing failures, there's also a spectacularly disastrous right-turn instruction off a rural road south of Carnforth, Lancashire, which will take you into a field and downhill at speed to crash-land in the middle of the M6 motorway. This uncorrected error has been there for years.

Whatever satnav you settle on, there's one thing you should buy first, even though it's distinctly non-tech:

A good quality road atlas.

We have the large-scale, multiple fold-out, ring-bound road atlas from Collins. Having tried just about every other type of road atlas over the years (those giant-size publications regularly available at 'discounted' prices are ridiculously large for storing / using in a car) the Collins fold-out publication has proved itself the best of the lot.

giraffe69

I've had a Tom Tom 520 for a couple of years and it's still going strong. I don't think much of the battery life and always leave it plugged in when in the car. I don't think the traffic information is worth paying for, it is not sufficiently accurate. The traffic cameras were poor because they were consistently out of date but if you want that service there is a good cheap alternative(£16.99 pa) which works from Pocket GPS World.
It's never got me lost (yet) and if it broke I would replace it possibly but not certainly with another Tom Tom.
They nag you to update your maps every ten minutes but so far I have not bothered.
That all sounds negative but I have found it reliable once on the road and the camera application has saved me getting a few points.

kwikbreaks

I don't think the traffic information is worth paying for, it is not sufficiently accurate.

There are two types of traffic - the sort that gets data from FM radio which is free (and useless) and the HD traffic which is also free - at least for the first year on Live models which are not much more expensive than their non-Live equivalents which get the data over GPRS and is spot on as it is collected "live" by you and other TomTom Live users. The other live services are good too if you don't have a smartphone - find the nearest virtually anything with google local search etc.

PhylPho

kwikbreaks wrote: »

There are two types of traffic - the sort that gets data from FM radio which is free (and useless) and the HD traffic which is also free.

Good point, I couldn't agree more about FM traffic and especially the crap put out by BBC regional stations as you drive around the UK. All these years on, and those stations still can't sync properly, so instead of the traffic info finishing and your incar set returning to what it was handling before, there's three or four minutes of Mrs Doris Bonkers ringing in about a pancake recipe.

That said though, I'm all in favour of the FM traffic -- after all, it seems this very service will totally !!!!!! up the Government's objectionable plan to force everyone to switch over to DAB in 2015, seeing as how mobile devices which take in the service can only handle it via FM. The powers-that-be are trying to put on a brave face and claim that mobile phones will be DAB enabled soon, but then, they would say that, wouldn't they?;)

coolsteel

thanks for your time people :beer:

missile

I have a Tom Tom 740 and I am very pleased with it.