Rubbish

Darren · Posted: Thu Oct 13, 2005 7:25 pm Post subject:

I live near Aldershot, despite the base roads being MoD property they are open to the public. However, Navteq class them as private and so won't consider them in route calculations.

As most journeys through Aldershot would encompass a journey on an MoD road at some point it makes any calculation a joke as it requires a detour around the base.
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Darren Griffin

peterc10 · Posted: Thu Oct 13, 2005 11:07 pm Post subject:

jimbo_hippo · Frequent Visitor Joined: May 18, 2005 Posts: 444

I reckon personal SATNAV is gonna be the big thing aimed at grown-uppy people this Christmas. When Tom Tom starts appearing in car ads you know where things are going. I'm no veteran around these parts but I would say that the forum is going to be flooded with "my sat nav can't find my house even though it was built 9 months ago" kind of posts. I appreciate that Triggers original post related to the lack of uprade-iness in his upgrade but I got a twinge of the kind of statements to come.

In fairness, it does take a while to realise that the brandname such as Tom Tom, Navman, Destinator etc is just an interpretor for data thrown at them from third party map companies and overall purchase price plays a part too. But its going to be fun around Jan 1st methinks 8O

Its nearly midnight and I'm nearly at the end of the bottle of red so it would be easy to volunteer to do a sticky along the lines of 'SatNav mapdata for beginners' but let me sleep on it. However I have tried Tom Tom, Navman Smart ST and Destinator and they all have their quirks. In a couple of years, when the revenues from the nav-explosion filter down to the map providers, things will be different. Plus, there will be so many people using the software that the companies will have to provide fixes pronto before their in-boxes are rammed. But its that tricky phase between specialist software and mainstream out-of-the-box at the moment and I think we'll see a lot of misguided threads threatening legal action for a while.

I'm guilty of ranting about Destinator PN for a while on this forum. Then realised that I had full Sat Nav software for the whole of Europe for £99 with some serious but not terminal flaws. If i switch to something else (again) I'll get a new set of issues. "Celery" as the French say.

What would shake up the sloppy providers is a resurgence of "try before you buy" satnav for PDA users. You could then browse a forum and get a feel for impressions before parting with cash. Instead we have a collection of "I spent £xxx and look what I got posts" (some of them mine Embarassed

!!)

There's been some valiant attempts at product comparison tables but it all moves so fast and most contributors do so voluntarily so it's never gonna be workable. What I would like to see is a comparison table of the pros and cons of the map data with a final column telling me which proggies use them but considering the voluntary nature of good, unbiased forums such as this its never gonna happen quickly or stay up to date.

Personally, I'm off to law school, then I'm gonna offer my services here. I may need assistants. Any takers? :-)

Brace yourselves guys...... Christmas is coming!
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Tom Tom GO 720
Orange M3100, Orange SPV M5000
TomTom Navigator 6, Destinator 6
Holux GPSslim

Darren · Posted: Fri Oct 14, 2005 8:42 am Post subject:

floody · Regular Visitor Joined: Feb 08, 2005 Posts: 75

I think we could all rant & rave all day about TT5 but the end result will be the same, your stuck with it unless you want to go back to paper versions.

What might be a good suggestion for future releases would be to hold back from buying it until 'experienced users' on this forum have given it a damn good testing. This would enable hard core users from a variety of locations to test it properly.

I know PWGPS do a test but they can't test everything & everywhere whereas if a handful of users could also have an input into the testing we might end up with a much more informed decision.
I know that before I went with the upgrade to V5 I waited a few months to get a handle of the kind of comments that were coming into this forum so at least I knew what I would be letting myself in for, so I can't really bitch about the downsides.

Maybe if this happened Tom Tom's sales wouldn't peak when a new release happened & there wouldn't be so many unhappy customers. Evil or Very Mad