Addres Book compatability (or otherwise)

[metroace]

Some of you may remember that I asked VM about the fact that the address book search feature in VM4 does not work with Pocket PCs. I had to push them 3 times but finally got this answer today:

Dear Sir,

We would like to apologize for the delay in answering as we had to take a close look at your case.

We would like to inform you that the concerned departement is currently investigating on the issue reported with the use of the address book in ViaMichelin Navigation 4 for HP Pocket PCs.

A patch to fix the issue is being made and will be put on the website as soon as possible. We will contact you by e-mail when it is there.

We are very sorry for the inconvenience you encounter at the moment. For the moment we suggest you to save addresses of contacts in "my saved items" as you were described in an earlier e-mail.

We hope to contact you as soon as possible with the news that the patch is available. We are at your disposal should you have any other suggestions or questions.

Yours faithfully,

- Customer Relations Department -
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TomTom XL Europe
Apple iPhone 3GS

[elan2s]

Well at least you got a real answer, which is more than many of us have had in the past!

As one of the few v4 users it would be great to have you feedback on the product (what's better, what's worse) and especially whether overall you would say that the upgrade from v2.5/3 to v4 is worth the cost?

Thanks in anticipation!

[martike]

As far as I’m aware, this is a “feature” which has always been listed but has never actually worked. Although the advertising announced integration with PDA address books, what passed for user documentation said in the small print that it was really available only for Palm users. Being kind, you could say that this was slightly misleading advertising, being less kind you could say they were lying about the software’s capabilities.

However, it’s quite a victory for you to have made them actually admit that there’s a fault in the software that needs fixing. Congratulations !

... but you’ll probably have to wait and pay for version 5 to get the patch !!!!

[metroace]

[martike]

I live in Luxembourg where postcodes are simply 5 numeric digits. I’ve never tried to use postcode look-up in ViaMichelin and I’m not sure exactly how to go about it, but I think version 2.5 didn’t have that function anyway.

I disliked version 3 so much that I reverted to 2.5, and there I’ll stay until I become convinced that version 4 is worth the additional cost. So far I’m thinking that when (if) I do decide to upgrade it’ll be to TomTom rather than VM 4, but that’s still an open question for the moment.

[elan2s]

Postcode search for UK and Netherlands came with v3 and the rest of Europe was only included for v4.

One of the challenges on the Palm with the address book fucntion is that whilst it can select the town OK it will only handle the street and number if they appear in the first line of the address in the Palm address book as it actually treats both address fields as one. If you have a house name rather than number it fails as it cannot identify the street name. Fine for those who live in towns where numbers are usual but less useful in the country

[martike]

Oooops ! My postcode is 4 numeric digits not 5.

We also usually prefix our postcodes with an international identifier, which in our case is L. German codes start with D, Dutch ones with NL, French ones with F, and so on.

There does seem to be some confusion over whether the two digit-ISO code should be used, or the old car registration codes.

I've never seen GB or UK as a prefix to a postcode, so I guess it didn't ever catch on there.

I know I'm way off-topic, and probably no one's really interested, but there it is anyway !

[metroace]

I used to live in Germany (Hannover) in the late '80s and used a 5 digit postcode but never prefixed it with anything. Maybe that caught on later.

The UK does not prefix because we have a more complex and obviously different postcode system than the rest of Europe. For instance, my postcode is UB7 0EE. A letter or two for the post town (UB = Uxbridge) followed by a number (or 2) followed by a space then another number then 2 letters. It all means something to the Post Office!
_________________
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TomTom XL Europe
Apple iPhone 3GS

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