Navigator 3 Places Not In Database

[Conor]

Just to add...

I installed MRE. Got Scarborough. Still no Whitby or Filey. Problem not solved. I'm going to continue with my Mapopolous trial and then if TomTom can't sort it, then bye bye TomTom. I've not got the time to waste on this especially when many other equally priced/cheaper solutions that do work are available.

Fortunately I found my old digi camera and its a CF card so I've got another 128MB to play with.

[tom9851]

Hi Conor. I have recently acquired TTN3 but due to some problems with it (like it being incredibly slow apparently due to my current SD card) I have reverted back to TTN2. To tell you the truth I am very impressed with it (I am also a HGV driver) and have found it invaluable, especially with the inclusion of the full post code navigation supplied free by Niels on this site. It is certainly not perfect but I have no experience of other systems so I wouldn't dare to comment whether it is better or worse than other systems. Following your initial post and the replies to it, I am beginning to doubt whether I will bother to re-load TTN3!
I just did a search on my TTN2 for Scarborough. Whitby and Filey.
Scarborough comes up without problems as Scarborough. Filey comes up as Filey (Scarborough). Now Whitby is a bit weird. If you type in Whitby it comes up as Whitby (Ellesmere Port and Neston) - which is as you know Merseyside!! But if you type in Whitb (and let it search on that) it comes up with the choice of Whitby (Scarborough) or Whitby (Ellesmere Port and Neston). I do know that one of the quirks of TTN is that it doesn't always use towns and counties but uses Unitary authorities - for example a lot of the places in Cornwall like St. Ives etc are under Penwith - which is the Unitary authority name. If you have to use the MRE maps to get these places then I totally agree with you that it is total crap!

Good luck either way

Tom

[Conor]

Cheers Tom. Stick with TT2. It sounds like they've stuffed TT3 well and truly. Searching using postcodes DOES work absolutely fine but you know yourself some of the addresses we get. I do alot of CMR and the addresses Miguel, Hans or Vladmir put on the notes are sometimes so cryptographic that its unbelievable.

[matt_e]

I'm from High Wycombe and was amazed that it's not there in TTN3. What is there when you look for HW is Wycombe Marsh and West Wycombe, both of which are small areas to the east and west of High Wycombe. Makes no sense at all.

Matt

[tom9851]

Yet it is clearly in TTN2! Crazy! 8O

[deesoft]

To XDA - Wigan si in Greater Manchester but it is also in the TTN3 Map Database, so why should Sale disappear? In MRE Altrincham isn't in the Database. Timperley, which is a 'suburb' of Sale, is in the map database. So having had TTN1, TTN2 I really consider TomToms offering a 'dogs dinner'

To Conor, I promise you that TomTom used to offer a better program and better service. I have been using their programs since they were know as 'Paltop' and sold software for Psion's.

David

[DavidW]

Places that were in the Navigator 2 database are missing in Navigator 3. My home town (Flitwick, Bedfordshire) has disappeared in Navigator 3.

To add to the problem, Navigator 3 tends to return more streets for a query than Navigator 2 did - not less (as one would have hoped - Navigator 2 didn't make best possible use of the information you gave it). As Navigator 3 returns all occurrences of the street name you enter in the whole county for an English town or city name (crazy as that is - there's 44 High Streets in Norfolk if I counted correctly), individual towns missing doesn't actually matter. Of course, that's not much comfort, because towns shouldn't be missing either.


There's a comprehensive analysis of the situation regarding address lookup in this thread (click the smaller words) - if you contact TomTom to complain please point them to that thread. It's about the only time I've posted some harsh comments about TomTom (the other was over GPS 2.09).

As I've written elsewhere in the forums today, I think it's a serious enough problem that it needs a map reissue for Navigator 3 Great Britain - though, as we see in this thread (click the smaller words), at least part of the problem may be with TeleAtlas.


Whilst I know it's hard to keep up with the fast moving forums (particularly as there's so many threads as people get into Navigator 3) this is about the fourth or fifth thread I've seen with active discussion of this problem - hopefully there won't be many more start up on it as I'm trying to link threads but there's a limit to what I can do.

Meanwhile, considering how many people spotted this so quickly, I'm surprised that it wasn't sorted during beta testing.



David

[deesoft]

Hi

I have just had response to my complaint to TomTo re Whitby and High Wycombe being missing. Despite me telling them that I do not know the postcode for my destinations. They insist that if I cannot find the Destination by County then Postcode, they will look into the problem!!!

How thick can you get!
When do I get my refund???

David

[Conor]

Here we go then...

My first e-mail to them..

Many towns are missing out of the UK database. They're there on the map but not in the database so when you type in the name of a town in the city field it does not come up. The East Coast of North Yorkshire suffers terribly with all towns from Filey, North Yorks, Scarborough (population 100,000) and Whitby, North Yorks (population 40,000) missing. Ironically, Scarborough WAS in TT2.

I bought this to replace my maps as I work as a HGV driver. IT IS OF NO USE TO ME. I do not get postcodes half of the time so can't always do it that way. I travel all over the UK and cannot be expected to know that XXX town comes under YYY authority where the street is listed.

I AM NOT THE ONLY ONE. Your database is MISSING MAJOR TOWNS IN GREAT BRITAIN. Take Whitby. Every single poxzy 2 house hamlet around it is listed and Whitby Station appears in a close zoom in of the map. But is it in the database? No.

THeir reply:
Dear Mr Turton,

The search engine has been altered slightly. Try searching for the county for any city you can not find or a post code search. If you still can not find an address send us an address you can not find with the full postal code and county and we will search for this address.

We hope to have answered your question to your satisfaction.
With best regards,

The TomTom Customer Support Team

My response:
It has been altered to the point of being completely unusable. Being able to select an address by town/city and streetname is one of the most fundamental ways of doing it in routefinding software.The idea of having Satnav is to find your way to places YOU DON'T KNOW. If I knew where the place was then why would I need Satnav to get there?

Take for example a common street name such as St Johns Road or High Street, there can be dozens in a county. I can be trying to find an address in an area some 200 miles or more from where I live. How am I supposed to know what the postcode for that street is? Some towns don't even have the postcode prefix for the county they're in as they're borderline with the next authority so may have that postcode instead.

Lets try an example and see how long it takes you to get the right one. Whitby in North Yorkshire, the town, does not appear for GB maps or Major Roads of Europe. North Yorkshire is one of the largest counties in England. The YO prefixed postcode covers the largest geographical area of the UK in regard to prefixes.

Lets take a common street name - Church Street.
Whitby (North Yorks) doesn't appear so according to your instructions I have to enter North Yorkshire as that is the county it is in.

I can reasonably assume it is a YO postcode so that narrows it down to THIRTEEN Church Streets listed with a YO postcode prefix.. BUT Whitby is near another authorities boundary so it doesn't necessarily have to have a YO prefixed postcode. So which one is it? I don't know..its the first time I'll have been and I live 400 miles away so common knowledge isn't possible is it?

You are assuming that someone looking for somewhere is going to have a full address including postcode. Sorry but in reality half the UK population don't know their own postcode and for someone like myself working in transportation, I don't get that many delivery addresses with a postcode but what I do get IS A STREET NAME AND A TOWN/CITY.

Being able to select an address by town/city and streetname is one of the most fundamental ways of doing it in routefinding software. Every other software I have tried has been able to do this with no problem. Why not yours? It is the most basic way to search for a place.

To be honest, if I don't get a satisfactory solution to this I'll be returning it to my retailer and going with something else. Quite a few others on the Pocket GPS World forums at www.pocketgpsworld.com feel the same way. At the moment, I cannot recommend your product to anyone. I have contacted reviewers to ask them just how hard they actually tested your software because reality dosn't match their reviews. Missing towns with populations of 100,000 out of the GB map city name database isn't acceptable is it?


We'll wait and see. In the meantime, my trial of Mapopolis is going well. I can enter Whitby as the city name and Church St and it goes straight ot it. Funny that...and half the cost of TomTom too.

[Conor]

[Nomad]

I think it is very poor when a supplier leaves such major places out of the database especially when they were present in an earlier version. This is clearly a TomTom problem not a Tele Atlas one. I upgraded because I was about to embark on the purchase of the European maps and thought it better to get the latest versions of these. I wish I hadn't now. TomTom should provide a free of charge method of correcting these map errors especially as I have pointed out to this forum that the post codes are also way out of date. Whilst some people may like using post codes I certainly don't and the primary search mode should follow the logical sequence of City/Town, street and street number.

Disgruntled Nomad

[SpeedCam]

:x Bartmouth in North Wales is another problem, fails to find it using the search, but shows up on the map view.

[DavidW]

Unfortunately the address lookup problem is being discussed now in numerous threads and no one thread is the obvious 'master thread' on this.

I've posted some comments on the reply Conor received in this thread (links on these forums show up as that slightly smaller text - click on it). Even if you know the postcode it's messy! Try NR12 9 then High Street to see what I mean.



David

[chris_de_wet]

Firstly a request - please could this topic be made 'sticky'?

Secondly, I have noted during a journey over the weekend that the current location entry at the bottom of the 'safety' screen is also incorrect.

During my trip I variously travelled through Cumbria, Stoke-on-Trent and Wales en route between King's Lynn and Aldershot!

The location entry seems to pick up the nearest place, then searches for the first place by that name in the database.

So for example I got 'Town End (Cumbria)' when I was actually at Town End in Cambridgeshire!

Yet another example of the crass nature of TT database look-up!

[matt_e]

And my home location is apparently Marylebone (Manchester).

Well I do live a few miles away from Marylebone (London) but why on earth it says Marylebone at all makes no sense to me as I don't think there are any boundaries, councils, parishes etc etc that connect my home location to Marylebone 8O
Matt

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