Sat Nav

Sue11

Firstly I would like to wish everyone a happy healthy new year.

My old Tomtom which we have had for many years has now died.
I need a new one but am totally confused by all the mod cons that come with them and hopefully someone can help. We also have a Garmin Nuvi which was purchased as it has TV but has never come up to the standards of Tomtom regarding directions and points of interest. Our total needs are map updates, full Europe maps, enough memory to add points of interest camp sites etc.

Sue

droopsnoot

In what way has it "died"? My old 720 started coming up with an "Insert card" icon even though it has internal memory, and that was just down to the internal memory being duff after a period of time, which is common for this kind of memory product. Adding a £2 2Gb SD card from the local CEX and re-installing the maps and program sorted the problem out.

Richard53

I am a big fan of Tomtoms and have never got on with Garmins, for the reasons you give. My GO720 has been used and abused for 10 years now, but the internal battery is dead and the map is well out of date. For not much more than the price of a map update, I can have a new one. I was looking at one on the Halfords website - Tomtom Start something - which has lifetime maps and full Western Europe coverage, which is all I need, and costs £79. It has more modern stuff like Lane Assist (actually quite useful) but you can disable it if you want.


Incidentally, the 10-year-old Tomtom (maps last updated 5 years ago at least) is way, WAY better in terms of mapping and routing than the built-in satnav in my wife's 6-month-old Skoda.

forgotmyname

I had an old Garmin i3 which did everything you mentioned, puzzled why a newer Garmin wont do what you require?

When TomToms came out i viewed them as Apple of the sat nav world, Sheep buy them, but the mapping was so much better in the Garmin.

But every satnav with no exceptions will have their glitches, take you off the main road and down a back street and back onto the main road again, or suddenly decide your on a different road etc.

You just need to use it even when you know where your going to see the how yours works in certain situations.

Richard53

forgotmyname wrote: »

When TomToms came out i viewed them as Apple of the sat nav world, Sheep buy them, but the mapping was so much better in the Garmin.

Baa.


I've had two Tomtoms and two Garmins. The first Tomtom was rubbish (kept switching off/resetting despite numerous repair attempts) but the FoC replacement after the warranty was long gone has been almost faultless. I didn't get on with the Garmins at all. One went on eBay after a month and the other was returned for a refund. Detailed but cluttered mapping and illogical route plotting, whereas the Tomtoms are clear to look at, easy to use and (in my experience) much better at getting you from A to B.


Not sure what you mean by the reference to Apple, unless having a product that works out of the box and doesn't require technical know-how to operate is somehow bad.

Sue11

Hi everyone
My old TomTom never had an SD slot and there wasn't enough room for updating maps. Anyway I have been on the computer all afternoon comparing TomToms and as Richard 53 said the start is the best option from Halfords and that was not because of price just due to less faults.
Thank you all very much.

forgotmyname

Richard53, the way they intially sold them were you could add your own stupid voices and other useless gimmicks, the maps were utter rubbish back then.

My little i3 just worked, although a tiny screen compared to the newer stuff.

May have to dig it out and see how outdated the maps are. Should be interesting around Notts and Leicester with the road changes.

But I had no issues with POI's and even the speed camera database from GPSWorld was it?

Richard53

My first Tomtom was rubbish, I have to admit, but that was the physical unit (constant hard drive faults) rather than the software, which was good. I have to confess to having a couple of the novelty voices (the !!!!!! actress one was funny until I forgot to switch back with my Mum in the car), but those got old very quickly.


The GO720 that replaced it (fully solid-state electronics) has been faultless, though. I can think of two occasions in ten years where it has sent me off on a silly detour, but for thousands of miles in UK, RoI and Europe that isn't bad. I found the Garmin route-plotting to be not very bright, and I wasn't keen on the cluttered screen. The Tomtom screen tends to be very clear and easy to read. If you want to take control (planning and uploading routes, breadcrumb trails etc) then the Garmin is the way to go, but for ease of use for the non-techie I much prefer the Tomtom.


I always used to have the speed camera database from PocketGPSWorld installed, but I let my subscription lapse and I find the built-in Tomtom database is almost as good. Not that I break the speed limit, of course.

Gloomendoom

Richard53 wrote: »

The GO720 that replaced it (fully solid-state electronics) has been faultless, though..

Has there really been any sat-nav made without fully solid state electronics?

Richard53

Gloomendoom wrote: »

Has there really been any sat-nav made without fully solid state electronics?

I was told that the original Tomtom had a small hard drive in it, and it didn't cope well with the knocks and bangs of being used in a car. It was forgetting the route mid-journey, switching itself on and off, and losing saved locations on a regular basis.


I never had it apart, so I can't confirm that, but a complaint direct to Tomtom head office in NL got me a new top of the range model by return of post, so once you got past the useless tech support the customer service was good. The new one (sent to me in 2006) has been so good I wouldn't consider anything but a Tomtom now. I just hope they still have Jane as the main UK voice. I have fallen in love with her.

facade

I think the newer TomToms have removed, or hidden some of the less used features.

On my 720, I can manually enter a gps location as a POI or goto, e.g. I use google earth to find the exact carpark/layby etc and I can enter the exact co-ordinates from the google earth status bar.
My colleagues with newer versions claim this is impossible?

There was a time when I knew how to send a POI file from the PC to the 720, I remember spending a few hours finding out how to do this on a nuvi.

I would suggest having a look at what is about cheap, and then downloading the instruction manuals to see if it is easy to upload POIs if that is important to you.

Have to admit I'm a bit of a luddite though, I still can't get on with this 3d view, I like the 2d map with my car going up the screen.