The Hizzle of T-Fizzle

In order to combat my extreme distaste for getting lost and driving in unfamiliar territory, X decided to get me a GPS after seeing Mike’s very cool Nuvi in action. After consulting with Mike and doing a good bit of research, we went with the TomTom One. We liked some features such as automatic display of POIs on the map, and advanced trip planning with multiple destinations and waypoints. About the only desirable feature it lacks is text-to-speech which allows it to call out street names (e.g. “Turn left onto Main Street” instead of just “Turn Left.” A unit with this feature was $100+ more.

Setting it up is fairly simple. Stick the suction cup arm on your windshield, put the unit on, plug it in, switch it on. You do have to do some sort of strange activation on the map. I did not turn it on until I got to my car and found that I have to go to some website and punch in a number from a credit-card like thing in the box and a number from the device itself and then enter a third number given by the website. Fortunately I have the internets in my phone, so I was able to set it up on the fly.

Next it had me choose a voice and punch in my home address and it was ready to go. I asked it to guide me home and off I went. Of course it chooses the most direct route, which is not the way I go, so I got to see how quickly it could recalculate the path. Eventually it got into sync with my actual route. I got home. It worked as expected. Not much of a test.

That night I went through all the options. There are tons - you can choose from a variety of POIs to display on the screen, choose colors, voices, what data is displayed, etc. Then I set up the Internet service. TomTom has an interesting feature where the GPS can use your phone’s GPRS/EDGE capabilities over Bluetooth to do a variety of interesting things, not the least of which is real-time traffic reports. Of course you have to have a Bluetooth phone and mobile Internet. Which, naturally, I do. Good thing I dumped the Sidekick! I was concerned it may not work on the MDA. A compatibility list on TomTom’s website does not list it, although it does list other HTC Wizard devices, and generally if it works on one, it works on others. Real-time traffic is nice but not a showstopper for me, so I would not be too disappointed if it wouldn’t work.

Well, it works. It was easy to set up, and seems to work fine with the MDA I chose “other” as my phone type. The only issue is that once the ONE connects to the MDA, the MDA will not reconnect to the Internet unless you recycle the radio by initiating a phone call.

The next day I put it to a real test. I told it to get me to work and drove off. It gave me a weird route to work, one that seems backwards at any rate, but is absurd at rush hour. I drove my normal way and let it figure it out, which it did fairly quickly. I found the traffic reporting to be OK but I’ll have to use it more before I decide. There was a cleared accident that was reported accurately, but shortly after, traffic was at a standstill. Since TomTom did not know I was in traffic (although it knows I’m on an Interstate…stopped…so you think it might at least guess and offer an alternative?), I wasn’t sure how to re-route myself. I could always exit and let it do it automatically, but given the odd path it chose originally, I was concerned that it would try to route me to that path. ONE also comes with very scant documentation. The paper manuals basically explain how to set it up and there are “guided tours” in the UI but they don’t cover everything in depth. Eventually I found a button to avoid a roadblock, but the unit assumes a single-point, not a line of traffic. When I did this, it directed me to exit at a cross street, cross that street, and get right back on the interstate. Since I knew the way in from the cross street I figured I’d go that way and see where it told me to go.

And it did just fine. At that point, it did not try to guide me back to the strange path it originally chose, but simply found a direct way to get me to the destination. The directions are fairly easy to follow, although there is a cartographic fudge factor that can cause issues with some of the less obvious directions.

You see, the device knows your latitude/longitude coordinates and uses this to place you exactly on the map. But it also knows that it is primarily a car navigation system, so it fudges a little bit to keep you on the road in case the margin of error makes it think you might not be. As a result, if I am at work on a road that is not yet in the map, it places me on the next road a block up.

Where this gets sketchy is in a situation where you bear off, if you are unsure of the true path (”Continue Straight On…” when either way could really be straight), you may choose one and then glance at the map to see if it was right. Your icon will continue to show you on the correct path for a couple of seconds because it tries to make an error correction until you are far enough from where it thinks you should be. So you bear right, your icon stays on target, you think all is well, then suddenly a few seconds later the icon jumps a bit and it recalculates your path.

Otherwise, it got me to work quite well. Over the past week I’ve used it to rove around traffic a number of times. I needed to get gas one morning and used it of find a nearby station. I’m not sure if its any faster to try to dodge the traffic, but its fun to drive around new places. I’ve since realized that the traffic function is hamstrung by a current inability in this area to get delay information (TomTom knows there is a traffic incident, but not how far the backup is) which makes the “re-route around traffic” function quite useless. I probably won’t subscribe to the traffic service until that gets resolved.

Now - Lee, Mike, Larry and the rest of you - when do we start geocaching?

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 7th, 2006 at 7:20 pm and is filed under GPS, Mobile Post. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.