x20 Wishlist, Quirks & Bugs

Outlander · Regular Visitor Joined: May 21, 2005 Posts: 145

I’m on my 3rd 730 one from Dixons and two from Comet took first one from comet back Friday morning and the second goes back Saturday morning. I think the forth may come from Argos. The one from Dixons is going back as it has bad battery life from full charge the other two because of buzzing on hands free.

We should have a competition to see who can return the most units before they get their hands on a good one. I for one don’t believe there is such a thing as a good one.

Darren and the gang have gone rather quite, Just wondering how he/they are getting on with theirs. Bet Tom Tom sort you out with good ones Laughing Out Loud

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mikealder · Posted: Sat Sep 01, 2007 6:50 am Post subject:

Mine came from Easy Devices and has worked with no real problems at all, I have lost my TTS settings for the speed cameras three times - the easy way around this is to either stop connecting the device to Home, or use ogg files for spoken camera alerts. Other than this single niggle which I can live with the device has been fine - Mike

pete1336 · Posted: Sat Sep 01, 2007 7:01 am Post subject:

mikealder · Posted: Sat Sep 01, 2007 8:40 am Post subject:

I haven't lost any warning settings since I switched to ogg warnings, that said the last time I connected the device to TomTom Home was to download the update to 7,010 - I don't use Home for anything else at all these days as I simply don't trust it. - Mike

wildcard · Occasional Visitor Joined: Nov 13, 2004 Posts: 44

I have just upgraded to the 720 from the Classic Go and can give you my first impressions. Overall it’s an improvement of course but I’m disappointed none the less as I had hoped the new unit would do 4 key things, provide MP3 play over the car stereo without having a professionally fitted connection, enable Bluetooth Hands free telephone , do something to improve screen visibility in strong sunlight (my Classic is impossible to read in this respect ) and lastly give me Voice activated control.

-Physically the unit is great – pocket sized with good screen legibility even in strong sunlight
-FM reception is not that good. Living near London I have found 103.5 to be the least worst frequency but it still give some interference. MP3 playback is of AM radio type standard with whistles, pops and background noise. Navcore 7.010 seems to have fixed the volume difference between MP3 and the spoken warnings. In the end I may have pay to have the unit hard wired. The whole purpose of inbuilt FM (and my choosing a 720 not a 910) was to avoid this.
-The poor Handsfree quality is a major issue. The loud buzzing heard by callers over the Bluetooth telephone makes the whole thing useless . I have replaced one unit already, the second is under test and a moderate improvement. I still of two minds whether to request a 3rd unit or seek a refund and go for a 910. Fulls marks to Handtec for a very prompt response for the first return (48hrs between my posting and the new unit arriving).
-The VAC is nice idea - but doesn’t work very well . The microphone is of too poor a quality – I have to lean towards it and shout at the TomTom ( don’t we all ) to stand any chance of the correct Town or Street appearing on the list or the unit understanding “OK” at the end . Everyone knows the whole purpose was to be able to safely input a destination whilst driving (of course TT can’t say this) – but you can’t do this without shifting in the driving seat. The unit needs a higher gain microphone as an accessory.

Niggles
-after years of correctly having the right street name for my home address , the new map gets this wrong !! . I can correct this with Mapshare but it shouldn’t have been wrong in the first place.
-autoscreen switch between day and night – set at too high a light level so when driving under trees etc during the day it switches back and forth from day to night. This is distracting and compromises safety. This feature needs a time override – or have a manual set for light level.
-the silly “Colliers” High Street TTS bug.
-a rogue 50 mph Speedcam warning appearing around J18 on the M25 – it appeared with the PGPSW icon but there is no camera nearby. I deleted the TT UK Speedcams completely and the problem went away
-Why is telephone playback only via inbuilt speaker – is this a hardware limitation
-Audio over FM uses up battery power at a phenomenal rate – about 2 hours of running – that’s all
- TTS quality is not that good. I guess the file compresion used in the x20 series over the 910 has compromised this.

Asks
-a scrolling ticker on the main driving screen showing the MP3 track playing / artist / album etc
-manual setting for light level to switch day to night settings
-an external high gain microphone like the 910
- as users are unlikely to change language, why not enable a download of a less compressed TTS file in place of all the unused languages.

I must be lucky
-no problems with a Kingston 2GB Sd card , although I used WE to copy mp3 across
-no problems connecting to a Nokia 6230i
-no problems retaining personal settings such as PocketGPSW speed cam spoken warnings
-the windscreen sucker was brilliant – rock solid . Although I have now gone for a passive centre consol Brodit mount .

Marks out of 10 , 6 currently - if Bluetooth fixed then 8
Value for money 6 - the extra features (TTS,FM,VAC,Bluetooth) are poorly implemented so questions the value of going for a top-of-the-range model like this . You might be better sticking with a base model and buying separate bluetooth and MP3 solutions

mikealder · Posted: Sat Sep 01, 2007 12:39 pm Post subject:

Have you found the Brightness Preferences screen, on this page is the option to disable the Turn brightness down when dark and/ or Switch to night view when dark,
If you then go to change preferences Quick menu preferences you can select "Switch day/night view so it is easy to get at when driving and have full manual control over what the device is doing.

FM transmitters have to be very low powered to be licensed in the UK, when in built up large cities (London being a prime candidate) you will suffer bleed through from the radio stations, as you have found it is not easy to locate a free to use channel. What car stereo have you got fitted as there are a number of other options you can look at, wired direct, FM Injection even Bluetooth (if the stereo will support it).

As for an external microphone, if they made one available there would be nowhere to plug it in to, there is only an audio output socket on the x20 devices.

The foreign voices are already on the disk that came with the device to save storage space, they have used heavy compression on the voices, that said you cannot tell the differences too easily when comparing a 910 with a 720. The actual Kate voice folder on a 910 is 311MB on the 720 its 43MB, that is one huge reduction - Mike

Andy_P · Posted: Mon Sep 03, 2007 2:06 am Post subject:

pete1336 · Posted: Mon Sep 03, 2007 7:12 pm Post subject:

Andy,
I think your spot on when stating tomtom's reply to me was arrogant. I whole heartedly agree. I also strongly suspect that the warning link could disappear using their own POI's and their response to me was just lazy and came from someone who simply couldn't be bothered to log it as an issue or investigate why the problem occurred.

Anyway, I have a theory as to why this might be happening. Here it is:
On first getting my unit I had a good play with it, initially I'd make a change somewhere, such as moving a POI and on doing this the TTS warning for my speed cams would be lost. Yet thereafter on duplicating the issue...moving a POI file they would be be retained.
I remember listening to an audio book one day and that too lost the settings, I set them back up and listened again to the audio book a few days later and hey presto, this time around they were not lost, they remained present. A third example would be the removal of my sd card from the unit, on at least one (possibly the first time) occassion this caused the loss of the link and I swear that on doing this same action a second and a third time, the link remained present.
I'm begining to think that my TTS warnings setup for speed cam files are only lost whenever I do something with the unit that I've not done previously. When I make some new change, done for the first time, they seem to go yet make that change for a second or third time and they are retained.
Any thoughts...apart from the obvious one of 'Pete, you're mad'.

Andy_P · Posted: Tue Sep 04, 2007 1:45 am Post subject:

pete1336 · Posted: Tue Sep 04, 2007 6:40 am Post subject:

Andy_P · Posted: Tue Sep 04, 2007 2:28 pm Post subject:

If this is going to keep on happening, once you have everything typed as you want, would it be worth recording the output of your Go to your PC (via the line out) and then saving the warnings as ogg files?

Then if it loses them again you can just load the files and use those instead.

pete1336 · Posted: Tue Sep 04, 2007 5:00 pm Post subject:

Andy,
That sounds like a capital idea but how would one go about that?

mikealder · Posted: Tue Sep 04, 2007 5:37 pm Post subject:

First of all you will need a 3.5MM stereo jack plug (same conection at both ends) Connect it to the PC's audio input (don't connect it to the microphone input though or you will only get distorted sound), some PC's have this available on the front, others are on the rear of the PC. The remaining end goes into the TomTom audio output socket.

Play some music via the TomTom and adjust the sound levels on the PC so it is loud enough, but not distorting.

Install Audacity on the PC and use this to record the sounds from the TomTom, its free and easy to find.

Set the spoken alert text in warn when near POI for the nearest POI to your current location.

Trigger the warning by using advanced planning followed by route demo to navigate to the nearest POI you have on the device, the same category of POI you set the text up for in the step above.

With the audio file captured using Audacity trim the ends of the recording to get rid of the no spoken parts at the beginning and end of the recording.

Use the export as OGG Vorbis format, 22050Hz sample rate, save the file with the name that matches the POI Category you are creating the warning sound for, the Audacity appllication will asign the correct file extension for you

Repeat the above for each of the sounds you want to create, it takes longer to rig the TomTom to the PC and adjust the levels than it does to create a full set of audio files - Mike

Andy_P · Posted: Tue Sep 04, 2007 6:03 pm Post subject:

If your soundcard can record "what you are hearing" (some can, some can't - see your sound mixer options for recording in Control Panel), then an alternative way that would keep it all digital could be to run the "virtual" TomTom in TT Home and play the sounds using the on-screen keypad.

I've not tried this in anger yet, but ithere's no reason why it shouldn't work.

e61 · Occasional Visitor Joined: Aug 10, 2007 Posts: 15

Or maybe try this one?
http://public.research.att.com/~ttsweb/tts/demo.php
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