Routeplanner

Warder · Occasional Visitor Joined: Jan 02, 2004 Posts: 2

Hi,

Has anyone used this product? I purchased it last week for a trip to the Netherlands over the New Year, and found it the worst bit of routing software I've ever used!

- The maps were out of date (an hour detour was caused by a bridge not even existing anymore!)
- The Bluetooth GPS integration was really bad, having to reset the PDA basically as the only way to get it to run each time I wanted to use it
- GPS never worked if Wizbar was running
- Unless a particular order was used to switch on bluetooth and run the darn thing, it would display garbage characters in the edit boxes and basically not work.

To summarize, a heap of crap.

I have used Navman on my old Ipaq 3870 and it was solid, providing beaming support was turned off, but my favourite by far is the Bluetooth Ipaq Navigation system software I use in the US. It works flawlessly with Bluetooth GPS... I wonder if a Europe version exists? TomTom should go have a look at that to see how things should work. (Of course if Navman were not complete

, locking their software to their hardware, I might still be running that...)

Does any of the other TomTom software work any better with Bluetooth GPS?

Thats enough ranting for the day Smile

Happy New Year.

Dave

Dave · Posted: Sat Jan 03, 2004 11:59 am Post subject:

Basically the history behind TomTom as a whole was that their flagship products over 2 years ago were CityMaps and RoutePlanner. They were good in their time as there really wasn't any competition available on the Pocket PC, but both these products sort of merged together with many new features and created TomTom Navigator 1, and then TomTom Navigator 2.

CityMaps maps have been updated to a Q1 or Q2 version in 2003, but AFAIK RoutePlanner has never been updated. So you probably would have issues with Bluetooth support under RoutePlanner.

Really the package to buy is TTN2, but it doesn't cover multiple countries in a seamless map like RoutePlanner does, you will either have to purchase multiple country sets of TTN2 or purchase the European maps, but when you cross borders across Europe, you will need to change map, and do singular routing between each map rather than as a whole.

If you're looking for complete routing across Europe, then I would wholeheartedly recommend CoPilot Live for this type of work.

TTN2 will work well with Bluetooth, you do get the BT Manager nag screens coming up when you run TTN2, but there now is a registry hack to avoid this.

DavidW · Posted: Sat Jan 03, 2004 6:15 pm Post subject:

I'm fully in agreement with Dave's reply - noting that upgrading the GPS driver to a fairly recent version will almost certainly make TomTom RoutePlanner work better. 2.08 and 2.09 may be best avoided - Darren posted a download link for 2.07 recently, which I can't find now...

RoutePlanner is old software, though - and I'm surprised it has not been discontinued. Maybe we'll see new features in Navigator 3 that finally make RoutePlanner obsolete - though I fear it may not be without requiring users wanting pan-Europe coverage to pay out for a complete set of European maps.

Indeed, TomTom's map purchasing policy looks somewhat confused now. The cheapest way of getting all the available maps is to buy Navigator 2 USA and the Europe maps add-on. Despite pleas from users in Europe, the only way to get the USA maps is to buy the full Navigator 2 USA pack (TomTom haven't, to my knowledge, released a "maps only" product for the USA). This means that if you start with a single-country version of TomTom Navigator 2 for one of the European countries, and you later buy all the maps, that copy becomes completely redundant and is hard to sell on as you've already activated it.

Meanwhile, some of TomTom's competitors seem to throw in at least some basic European coverage with their UK product (certainly I believe this is the case for the Navigon software in the Aldi bundle), albeit possibly charging somewhat more for the product. Some can only be bought as a Europe-wide package (I believe the various Navman products fall into this category) - though that arguably makes those who only want single country coverage pay for something they'll never use. ALK seemingly offer both options for CoPilot Live; if you have the UK only version you can buy an upgrade code online that unlocks the Europe maps.

The problem at the moment with TomTom Navigator is that you can't roll your own map files with the data you want on your PC, so distributing all the maps ready to unlock would make the product fill a whole stack of CDs (it's something like 15 for all the maps) - it certainly wouldn't fit on a single DVD.

Only time will tell as to what the purchase options are for a future upgrade of Navigator. There's certainly nothing announced yet.

David

pugwash · Occasional Visitor Joined: Nov 11, 2003 Posts: 24

Howdy -

I'm trying to resusscitate Route Planner today because I'm off to Greece this evening and it's the best I've got in terms of nav software.

Unfortunately... I can't get the program to realise I've got a GPS plugged into it. I'm using the GPS 3.03 driver, which I guess might no longer work with RP. I tried exiting WizBar (got quite excited reading this thread) but to no avail.

Does anyone know if RP really doesn't work with GPS 3.03 and perhaps have a version of the GPS driver it WILL work with?

Chris

pugwash · Occasional Visitor Joined: Nov 11, 2003 Posts: 24

I am a complete moron. I forgot RoutePlanner had a, ahem, "Use GPS" button on its options screen.

I blame the parents...

Chris

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