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I thing you're being a bit obtuse here. See my comments about cycling with it somewhere earlier in this post.
If you run on battery it might be understandable for some functions to be pushed back a little but to lose all voice commands at around 55% battery power is a bit dramatic especially as aside from bluetooth, jukebox, lane guidance, traffic blah blah blah,....issuing a voice command should be pretty high up the list of things the device should do on battery until it's nearly dead!
FWIW I rarely run on battery myself. But I couldn't disagree with someone who does as it is supposed to be battery powered and has cycling and walking modes.
And as for the drill comparison, if I had an electric drill and it stopped offering me hammer action after 10 minutes of use then I'd be shopping elsewhere pretty soon. If Tom Tom don't think this is worthy of attention in a forthcoming release there will be a lot of battery-running users also shopping elsewhere.
It says it navigates on battery written on the box. Either reprint the box, ammend all online specs and say it doesn't so we can chose or make it perform the features it is sold on.
Jimbo _________________ Tom Tom GO 720
Orange M3100, Orange SPV M5000
TomTom Navigator 6, Destinator 6
Holux GPSslim
Joined: Oct 08, 2007 Posts: 2544 Location: Toronto CANADA
Posted: Tue Mar 10, 2009 11:23 pm Post subject:
Jimbo......
Obtuse is my middle name.......
Nevertheless, I was just reacting to your previous post where you were in a car and not using the car charger.
I'm just reiterating what Mike (and others here) have said repeatedly.... essentially, what do you think that car charger is for? Decorations?
I do not question the disappointment of those who find that TT suggests the unit can be used on a bicycle or while walking and they receive nowhere near 5 hours of battery life. That's why TT say 'up to', to cover their back side.
And while the unit can be used in a non-motorized vehicle mode, I would opine that anyone who says the main reason they got their gps unit was for use that way is being disingenuous.
Joined: Aug 03, 2007 Posts: 379 Location: Berkshire
Posted: Wed Mar 11, 2009 8:40 am Post subject: voice gone
My computer voice for navigation still doesn't work; have reported whole sorry saga to TT and this forum to show extent of problem.
All they suggested was hard reset/reformat TT Drive after backing up etc, reloading/updating via TT Home.
You are warned not to copy back 'Loquendo' files.
After all that when I select Kate or Steve, if I press TEST, I hear nothing.
Next step is to try running Clear Flash Tool. _________________ Gel
Lifetime Member Thames Valley, Berkshire, UK
Mazda CX-5 built in SatNav- not sure if TT or not. Garmin NUVI in reserve.
I have to agree with the "features on the box" argument. Reason I bought a 720 was those features - with the stuttering voices, no FM, etc. I might as well have bought an XL as TT had downgraded my 720 to a non-720.
But everyone is assuming that the voice being turned off early in the battery depletion cycle is a feature, I have to differ: I think it's a bug, or at least a nasty bug avoidance workaround inflicted on us.
For first few weeks I ran 720 on battery, and on long trips it would fail. On 1st trip with v7 it did what you'd expect a battery powered device to do, it got a little slow, dim, and unresponsive. So it was pretty obvious that it needed charging. But it got a long way down the battery meter display. It wasn't the time on the box, but it was in the "marketing ballpark" for such things. And all functionality was still there.
On v8 it would lose sound, and lose it early. And it would do it based on an event. It never turned off the sound while it was silently navigating. It would turn off the sound at the very moment a call came in, or at the start of something complex, big junction with lane display, etc. Now I would expect using the speaker to be the biggest single battery drain, however if that was the "camel that broke the straw's back" I would believe that it would happen during the speaker use. Even if the startup current outputing to the speaker was enough to send it over the edge, by the law of averages it shouldn't always be on the leading edge of the event. And the battery voltage should recover enough for a bit more life if it was just a sudden current drain.
I'm convinced based on the stuttering voice issue, that TT have got this far without a proper interrupt handler (the low level code which services alerts - interrupts - from the hardware saying things need processing - servicing). The stuttering (which is apparently still there, just reduced in frequency of occurrence), the repeating sounds, cutoff speech, the backlight display dimming/not dimming, delayed display, loss of sync between spoken and displayed distances, etc, etc, are all manifestations of missed and/or delayed interrupt servicing.
I suspect that the sound loss is simply that the battery servicing has preempted audio to the point that the audio is left in a wait state, ie. it never gets serviced in time and loses it place in the queue.
Either TT need to develop a proper priority driven interrupt routine, or rewrite the one that they've got. A bigger battery just isn't going to fix this, it'd be like the current stuttering problem - raise the threshold to were most people won't encounter it often enough to see a pattern and complain.
Do I think TT will fix this? No. Unfortunately TT seem to have moved from being a Engineering-driven company to a Sales/Marketing-driven company, and this sort of thing happens in those sort of companies. No-one in development is going to get the budget to do re-work that doesn't add features. Now if they would just open-source the code to get out from under Microsoft's threat - but that ain't likely either.... _________________ Go Premium X / Go 1005
Joined: Jun 04, 2005 Posts: 19991 Location: West and Southwest London
Posted: Wed Mar 11, 2009 1:52 pm Post subject:
I think the last paragraph is all too true....
An engineer would admit there was a problem and the majority of users would accept that and wait for a "fix".
The marketing men are too terrified to admit ANYTHING in case someone sues them, so we have to drag every bit of information out of them by the teeth.
Joined: Aug 03, 2007 Posts: 379 Location: Berkshire
Posted: Wed Mar 11, 2009 6:44 pm Post subject: No Computer Voice
Ran flash removal tool and still same problem ie computer voices are silent.
Others strangely are OK.
Have got TT to agree to take back for repair as still within 12 mths of purchase; presumably I'd be unlikely to get same unit back?
They have pointed out unhelpfully that they only guarantee hardware, and if nothings found unit will be returned, so I will still be left with an impotent TT720 : , thanks to their naff software, which it seems they will ignore in equation.
At least they'll see in flesh what many of us suffer from, if they haven't already seen. _________________ Gel
Lifetime Member Thames Valley, Berkshire, UK
Mazda CX-5 built in SatNav- not sure if TT or not. Garmin NUVI in reserve.
Nevertheless, I was just reacting to your previous post where you were in a car and not using the car charger.
.
I do use my TTgo in a car and without charger. That is in the cases of short trips (< 15 min) but with complex routes inside Madrid.
In those cases it is not worth for me to arm up a full installation at the beginning and at the end of the trip, while I do need the device during the trip.
I understand I have to use the charger in medium-long trips or simply when the battery advice to be low.
With this functionality I decided the purchase of my TT.
I am talking from "customer requirement"point of view, not from the "technology limitation" aspect as you and mike have been doing. These two points of view are basically what is dividing us in our discussions.
At the bottoim line, if there is a technological limit I do not have problem to believe it but TT should not write on the boxes either online the battery use feature.
In the meanwhile I do believe that this feature is very useful for me in several cases (also in the car), so I feel in the right to go on claiming these promised features to TT without leaving my device at home as of Mike suggestion.
Joined: Jun 04, 2005 Posts: 19991 Location: West and Southwest London
Posted: Wed Mar 11, 2009 7:29 pm Post subject: Re: No Computer Voice
peasemore wrote:
They have pointed out unhelpfully that they only guarantee hardware, and if nothings found unit will be returned, so I will still be left with an impotent TT720
Ah, but they will have to make the software work, in order to prove to themselves that he hardware is OK, won't they?
Anyone else noticed a file in the root of the TT called backtrace.txt?
Mine now keeps crashing on handsfree calls and I lose all audio, the unit reboots then I have NO AUDIO AT ALL and a power off initiates a reboot. The only way out of the loop is a hard reset.
I have reformatted, reinstalled apps and map from scratch, reset to defaults (hardly necessary as no config on the device), performed another hard reset followed by a clear flash and then paired the phone from scratch (deleted pairing on phone and started again).
Same thing happens all over again on the first phone call.
Oh, and the map lag is back, but only when reading out long complex instructions and road names. I strongly suspect that 8.302 is a quick fix release to try and placate everyone who has complained by turning off all other processing whilst instructions are read out.
Joined: Aug 05, 2006 Posts: 407 Location: Alconbury - UK
Posted: Wed Mar 11, 2009 10:04 pm Post subject:
I must admit that I always use the car charger, even for short trips, but having read some comments on here, I decided to go "Powerless".
It took exactly 15 minutes to stop speaking completely. There was no stuttering or fading or anything else, one minute it spoke and then it didn't. This was the Kate voice and our own Liz warnings.
Map refresh and graphic quality were not affected, even when the battery warning was flashing red. _________________ TT Go 720 (T)
Firmware 9.430. Map: Western Europe V 875.3613
TT iPhone app
V 1.23 Map: Western and Central Europe 2 GB V 965.7286
TT iOS Go Mobile
V 1.1 Map: Western Europe 965.7248
Correct, a backtrace is a linux/unix term for a type of crash dump: a stack dump. From Ubuntu Wiki:
Quote:
A backtrace shows a listing of which program functions are still active. Since functions are nested when they are called, the program must record where it left one function, to jump into an inner one. It does this on the stack, which we dump for the backtrace.
By getting a backtrace at the point of a bug, a developer may be able to isolate where that bug is, because it will narrow down to the function, or even the line, that caused the erroneous behaviour.
Joined: Jan 14, 2005 Posts: 19638 Location: Blackpool , Lancs
Posted: Wed Mar 11, 2009 11:59 pm Post subject:
If TomTom have decided to log device crashes and the root cause of a device crash then this is for the good of all users, lets face it any device generated feedback is going to be accurate as to the cause of the problem, a little trend analysis should soon show up issues across a wide user base.
If this leads to more stable software/ better performance from the device and is transparent to the user what’s the problem? - Mike
Joined: Nov 13, 2008 Posts: 59 Location: Atherton lancashire
Posted: Thu Mar 12, 2009 12:21 am Post subject:
These Error .TxT they have these on all operating systems to report errors, this what tomtom is basically is, can not see this being a problem ..
this battery problem it maybe down to the battery dropping a cell due to running the unit down to very low charge instead of keeping the unit charged all the time .. i allways have mine plugged in when on the RD with bluetooth on and TMC connected..
also i have seen bigger battery packs on fleebay for tomtoms (not tomtom there 3rd party) not sure if there any good.
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