Open letter to TomTom about address lookup (Navigator 3 GB)

[DavidW]

Dear all,

I have spent several hours this morning writing a careful explanation to TomTom that all those unhappy about the situation in Navigator 3 Great Britain can send to TomTom. I hope this thread will be made Sticky, but I don't currently have the ability to do this myself.

This is extremely long, because there is quite a lot of detail to explain. I'm hopeful that, in some cases, program changes may improve matters, as sometimes there's information in the database that would allow a better search that isn't used, which is why there's all the detail.

Please, send everything between --- BEGIN --- and --- END --- below, not including those markers, when you send this to TomTom. Please do not make any changes. I would encourage you to add a statement that it is an exact copy of the 'open letter'. You are free to make your own comments in support of the 'open letter' and about the specific problems you are experiencing. However, bombarding TomTom with lots of copies of the letter that are different is not going to help our cause. The letter takes some time to read through fully, and wasting their time isn't going to do any good, no matter how frustrated you may be.

Do state which version of the program you are using when you write. The current latest version is 3.01. It is possible that some program changes will be made that improve matters in later versions - in which case I may have to revise the 'open letter' if TomTom haven't conceded by then that there's a serious problem that they need to look at.


The letter is so long that I've included what is hopefully a punchy summary at the top. I've also had to leave out some issues, such as the display of place names bug that harks back to Navigator 2 (for example, you sometimes see Marylebone (Wigan) on screen when in Marylebone (London) in Navigator 2 - and Marylebone (Manchester) in Navigator 3).

I will feed back anything I hear to the forums.




David

--- BEGIN ---

An open letter to TomTom about database problems and address lookup in Navigator 3 GB


This is an open letter to TomTom written by David Wood, david@wood2.org.uk (Pocket GPS World user name DavidW, forum rank "Fanatic", with around 1200 posts, a large number of which are on TomTom Navigator 2 and Navigator 3), on behalf of many Pocket GPS World forum users and posters.


Dear TomTom,

In summary, my complaint is:

Address lookup in Navigator 3 Great Britain is seriously defective. Searching for a common street name in England, such as "High Street", can produce a list of over 40 entries right across the county of the town entered, and it can prove necessary to go on a lengthy trial and error exercise to locate the correct street. There are often many more entries to check through than there were in Navigator 2 Great Britain.

I urge TomTom to look at this issue urgently, and consider all means necessary to improve matters, even as far as reissuing the Navigator 3 Great Britain maps.


In full, my complaint is:

I write as a user of the Great Britain maps in TomTom Navigator 3, who has been following this issue on the forums at Pocket GPS World, http://www.pocketgpsworld.com

Like other users, I find the address name lookup difficult, and in some cases near impossible to use in Navigator 3 GB.


TomTom Navigator 2 GB used to ask you to enter a place name, referred to as "City". Navigator 2 then used to offer streets in the entire "administrative area" of that city - that being, in most cases, a borough council, district council, city council or unitary council area. Navigator 3's behaviour is different - certainly in England, it offers streets in the entire county of the city entered, so it returns streets from a much larger area.

Navigator 3's behaviour helps in a handful of cases. There were complaints in the forum from Navigator 2 users struggling to find streets in the outskirts of major cities, when the outskirts fell outside the area of the main city council. One example was someone trying to find a street in Thorpe St Andrew, on the outskirts of Norwich, which falls outside the Norwich City Council area in the Broadland District Council area.


In most cases, Navigator 3's behaviour is less helpful than Navigator 2. If the street name is common and the 'city' in a large county, there can be a large number of results to try. For an example, search for "High Street" in "Stalham", a medium sized town in Norfolk. This gives 46 results, with the correct answer, High Street NR12 9, at number 11. Some of the entries are 40 plus miles away from Stalham - High Street PE38 9 is High Street, Downham Market - the quickest route (at the default) speeds to the real High Street, Stalham, NR12 9 is 66.6 miles and 1 hour 32 minutes.

If you are not familiar with the town, you may, at best only be able to guess the prefix is NR for Norwich. Even if you enter "High Street NR", you have 28 entries to check, and the correct answer is number 6 on the list.


Navigator 3 does go some way towards helping. If you have an address in Contacts, and you use the "Navigate to" or "Show TomTom map" functions, it appears that Navigator correctly uses the postcode to work out which of the various options it wants.

Quite often, though, Navigator 3 doesn't make the best use of the data it has. If you know that the High Street you want is NR12 9, and you enter "NR12 9" for the city, using the new (partial) postcode functionality in Navigator 3, then "High Street", you still get all the High Streets in Norfolk. If you try to help Navigator by entering "Stalham", then "High NR12 9", the first answer is "High House Avenue, NR18 0", which is a nonsensical result. Only if you enter something that refers to Norfolk as the city (whether it be the county name (Norfolk), the name of any town in the database in Norfolk, or any partial postcode in the county of Norfolk), then "High Street NR12 9" do you go directly to the correct answer. Particularly in a mobile setting, entering the whole of "High Street NR12 9" is far from easy.


There are many situations when you don't have the correct postcode and can't get it easily - or at all. http://www.royalmail.com - the official web site of the UK Post Office, does have a postcode finder, but it is not at all Pocket Internet Explorer friendly. You have to push 'View label' on a result before you can even view the postcode, as the site doesn't cope well with the small screen size of a Pocket PC. The site is very graphic intensive and really not suited to any kind of mobile Internet connection. Further, you are limited to eight postcode lookups in a 24 hour period.

In common conversation in the UK, postcodes are not mentioned. For example, "See you Friday night at The Hobgoblin (a pub) on the High Street in Bedford". A local might just know that's MK40 1 - but if you're not local, and you get that instruction via your mobile phone, you're in a tricky situation with TomTom Navigator 3 with 42 results to go through. You might be able to dismiss some straight away, but that's still a lot of information to go through considering there's only one High Street in Bedford.

One new Navigator 3 user on the Pocket GPS World forums (user name "Conor") is a heavy lorry driver. He says that much of the delivery paperwork he has lacks postcodes, making Navigator 3 very hard to use. After all, people in England expect you to be able to find them on a map using a city or town name, a street name and house number. Conor is already evaluating Mapopolis. Even if you call a company you're trying to visit or deliver to, the person answering the phone may not have their postcode - this is particularly true of businesses such as restaurants and pubs.


There is a thread on the forums about people who have upgraded to Navigator 3 and are removing Navigator 3 and reinstalling Navigator 2 because of this problem. There's a thread entitled "Upgrade to Navigator 3 is a waste of money", which is about this problem - in this case "jasb" was trying to find "High Street, Wednesbury". "Dodgy" has started a thread called "How many have reverted back to TT2?".

It's not just "High Street" that causes problems. Road names like "The Crescent" (in this case, the user was looking for "The Crescent, Stevenage") and "Church Street" are also common in England, and there can be quite a few results to sort through.


Navigator 3 doesn't even make best use of the information you give it alongside the information it does have in the maps. If you enter a partial postcode, such as "NR12 9" as the "city", it seems nonsensical that Navigator returns results that contain anything other than that postcode. In cases where there are several roads with the same name and same partial postcode, they appear in the Navigator 3 selection list with the place name in brackets afterwards. One example is "High Street NR27 9 (Cromer)" and "High Street NR 27 9 (Runton)" - yet searching for "Cromer" then "High Street" gives you the same list as searching for "Stalham" then "High Street", even though High Street, Cromer is in the database.

As things stand, there's little point in Navigator 3 asking for a city if you want to look up an address in England. Unless you want to go to the centre of the city, town or village (which, it has been discovered in the Pocket GPS forums, can be achieved by entering no street name), you may as well just be asked for a county. English counties cover large areas.


In fairness, it seems that address lookup issues are not unique to Navigator 3. Users of Navman's Smart ST Pro 2, which also uses TeleAtlas geodata, say in the forums that they have some problems looking up addresses. Most users, though, were hoping address lookup would work better in Navigator 3 than in Navigator 2. Instead, address lookup is worse - you usually have more streets to check through in Navigator 3 than you did in Navigator 2. This is a great shame; in many respects Navigator 3 is an improvement over Navigator 2.


I appreciate that this is probably not an easy issue to solve, and a complete fix - that is, the ability to search for streets accurately within a county, town/city or partial postcode - may well require a reissue of the Great Britain maps with a fixed, and possibly rather larger, database. However, I would urge that this is done as a priority.

I understand that it may be easiest to reissue the current Navigator 3 Great Britain maps with a fixed database, and appreciate that even that may well be a major undertaking. If it turns out that the maps need to be completely recreated to solve this problem, I would ask you to consider starting with the most recent TeleAtlas data available, in the hope that the Navigator 3 maps would then contain the new and important M6 Toll road.

It is of note that there are town and cities missing from the Navigator 3 database that, in at least some cases, were in the Navigator 2 database. These include David's home town of Flitwick, Bedfordshire. Other examples missing from Navigator 3, though not necessarily in Navigator 2, are High Wycombe (Buckinghamshire), Altrincham (Greater Manchester / Cheshire), Disley (Cheshire), Knutsford (Cheshire), Sale (Greater Manchester / Cheshire), Buxton (Derbyshire), Whitby (North Yorkshire), Filey (North Yorkshire), Scarborough (North Yorkshire) (there seems to be a big problem with all coastal towns in North Yorkshire), Bedworth (Warwickshire). If a map reissue is required, it would be helpful if all these could be looked at.


In the short term, any steps that can be taken to improve the search behaviour of Navigator 3 with the current maps would be appreciated. Some examples where the behaviour may be able to be improved are given earlier.

Please copy any replies to David so that he can update the forums, or, indeed, update the forums directly yourselves.


Yours sincerely,




David Wood

--- END ---

[DavidW]

Any feedback on my letter is welcome.


I'm a little concerned after posting this earlier today that, apart from one comment in one thread where I've mentioned this, nobody has let me know that they agree with my letter and/or have sent a copy to TomTom. It is Saturday, though.

I'm sure my letter may not be absolutely perfect, but it did take me several hours to research the examples and write the letter, and I did the best job I could to edit it in the time I had.


In particular, any indication from people who are so badly affected that they've not only sent a copy of this to TomTom but have downgraded to Navigator 2 might be interesting.


Do feel free to post any comments in this thread - if I receive anything from TomTom I'll make it sufficiently bold and large that it stands out amongst other posts.

Anyone is welcome to email me or private message me over this, too - though I may not be able to reply to everyone.


To email TomTom, you need to create an account on the support part of their web site, log in, then read one FAQ. You should then see the "Send an email" option appear at the left of the screen. You should answer the few questions asked (I think this counts as 'technical query' - that's how I sent my copy).

In your message, note what version of Navigator you're using and say that what follows is a copy of the original open letter by David Wood, which you agree with. Feel free to add any comments of your own at this point - about other examples you've come across, or about how badly you have been affected by this problem. It will probably help TomTom if you quote the reference number of my copy of the open letter, which is '040508-000360'.

You then simply drag across the entire text of the "open letter" (between the BEGIN and END markers, but not including them), press CTRL and C on your keyboard, click in the TomTom email window and press CTRL and V to paste it.



David

[spile]

I'm a new user to this software and and find it does beahve in a non-intuitive manner.

I think your letter summarises the problem clearly.

Thanks for writing it.

Brett

[Steveg]

David

I too am a fairly new user of TomTom software. Buying TTN3 initially, and never having ever used TTN2, I therefore feel that your letter is only relevant to myself in parts which do not mention TTN2.

Could I have your permission to slightly edit your letter? - I understand if you refuse as you have stated your reasons already - and add my own personal thoughts on the crapiness of the Outlook integration also.

I do however plan to use your letter and will be sending my copy in sometime in the next few days

Kind regards

Steve

[DavidW]

I'd rather you didn't edit the letter itself, simply so as not to over-burden TomTom with having to read through different variants of what is rather a lengthy document. For many, the issue is that not only is Navigator 3 GB bad at finding streets, but it's worse than Navigator 2 GB in many cases.

However, I quite understand your situation - you can't endorse comments on a product you didn't use!


Why not put a comment at the top along the lines of (you can certainly edit these to taste!):

I was not a Navigator 2 user, so I can't make the comparisons that David does in his open letter, nor can I pass any judgment on the operation of Navigator 2 GB. However, I agree with those parts of his open letter, which I have attached unaltered, about the problems with Navigator 3. In particular, I agree with David's findings that the address feature of Navigator 3 GB is difficult to use in many situations.


I'm not asking people to put their name to the open letter itself (though if they want to do so, I'm honoured) - just to their own comments and endorsements of the open letter before they copy and paste a copy of the open letter.

For similar reasons, I have not claimed the support of all forum members or any of the Pocket GPS Team for this (though I did discuss the idea with one team member privately) - I just put "on behalf of many Pocket GPS World forum users and posters", mindful that quite a few people had encouraged me with this idea.


I had those who hadn't upgraded from Navigator 2 in mind when I wrote the open letter - it's hard to include everyone, and I felt, on balance, that it was important to make the comparisons with Navigator 2, especially as I can only presume someone made a deliberate decision to change the behaviour (which, I have to say, was far from perfect in Navigator 2 GB - but, in most cases, was better than Navigator 3's behaviour). I had hoped that the letter was not going to be a lengthy document, but when I started to work on it, I realised that it was important to explain the issues fully with worked examples.

Most people that supported my original proposal to write this letter were users who had upgraded; I think the ability to compare Navigator 2 and Navigator 3 brings the problems in Navigator 3 more sharply into focus.

That said, I'm delighted for any support with this, and that people who haven't been able to compare Navigator 3 to Navigator 2 are interested in this says something, I believe.


I'm not trying to antagonise TomTom, nor to make their support staff's lives hard, which is why I've asked people not to change the open letter itself. I've tried to write the open letter with understanding of their situation - I was a software engineer myself until ill health forced me to give up work, and I do appreciate that a complete fix may require a substantial reworking of the database element of the map data.

However, I do think they need to realise that there is some considerable depth of feeling over this, and that their paying customers really do want something done to help. Some forum posts do indicate that this is costing them sales.


Of course, do feel free to add any other comments you like if you do send a copy (and I'd be delighted if you do send a copy). If people want to post their comments publicly, as well as sending them to TomTom, feel free to post them in this thread.


If you still feel uneasy with my proposed way ahead (which is to add a rider amongst your comments comments), then I think the next best solution is if you produce a variant of the open letter you're happy with, Steve, email it to me, and so long as I'm happy, I'll post it here as a variant for users that didn't upgrade to use. We can add a short preamble to explain that it's a variant of the full open letter, and ask that people include that preamble if they wish to send the variant version.



David

[GeoffT]

David,

I think your letter covers the problems with TT3 very well. I was not a TT2 user so cannot comment on that part. I have already complained to TT (via their support page) about the address finding in TT3. If it wasn't for niels' superb ukpostcode add-on I think TT3 address finding would be bad enough for me to demand a refund.

Hope your letter encourages TT to fix this

Geoff

[digitalbullet]

Hi david

Im relatively new to the Tomtom arena but was quick to note that it doesn't do what it does in the most intuitive of manners.

I sent the letter to tomtom yesterday morning. Needless to say I have not had a reply from them.

In the meantime Im actually thinking of selling my TTN3 and buy a Navman as Ive heard its alot easier to use than TTN3 and you get alot more in the box. TTN3 is now going for £149 at some places, guess they've figured out how bad it really is: http://www.totalpda.co.uk/Tomtom-Navigator-3-Bluetooth-Kit.aspx

Many thanks for taking the time and effort for writing this. If you hear anything from them be sure to let us know.

[PhilJ]

David,

I too am a new user.

Thank you very much for the effort of making such a detailed response. I will be sending the open letter and hope everyone else who has complained will do so too as only a significant display of customer dissatisfaction is likely to result in the problems being resolved anytime soon.

For the record, I think the effort you and others put into this site is amazing and is very much appreciated by the rest of us.

Thanks again,

Phil

[tom9851]

David, I have not been able to access the net since friday afternoon so I have only just had the opportunity to log onto this forum and see your post. As you will know from my own posts on this forum, I am indeed one of those previous TTN2 users who upgraded to 3 and reverted back to 2 as a direct result this address look-up issue. My TTN3 upgrade cd has now been consigned to my desk drawer, sadly! I have just read your letter (twice in fact) and am certainly more than happy to endorse its contents without reservation. I will be following your instructions regarding sending it to TomTom in the next hour.
I want to take this opportunity to thank you for the work you must have invested in producing the letter. I am certainly grateful to you for this and believe others, who are equally unhappy about this situation, will also add their support to this thread in due course.
We can only hope that TomTom, after reading and digesting the contents of your letter, and the many other e-mails sent independently by others on this same subject, will make some constructive efforts to solve this problem.

Cheers

Tom

[tom9851]

David, just to let you know that I have just posted the letter via e-mail on TomTom's site and they have just emailed acknowledgement (ref 040509-000179) of same.

Tom

[R1chard]

[SpeedCam]

8O David, like the others I've just logged the same fault using your letter as requested. Ref : 0509-000264.

I've been using TomTom since version one and the search functionallity is a backwards step. Today I was trying to Navigate to Baldock, couldn't find it, so not knowing which county tried Bedfordshire, then Hertfordshire eventually Baldock Station was listed, not Baldock.

Have you had any response from the PocketGPS team on this matter, I'd also suggest that the TomTom V3 review rating should be amended to reflect these problems.

When TomTom V1 was released this site had a page showing the missing map data compared with AutoRoute, a similar V2 'v' V3 map data error page would be helpful.

[Oldie]

David,

As a TTN user from version 1.X, I agree totally with the points raised in your open letter. I have just submitted it to TomTom and I have received the automatic reply (040509-000310).

Let us hope that something is done to rectify the problem.

Richard

[tom9851]

David, I have received a reply from TomTom but unfortunately it is a standard automated one dealing with questions and answers on obtaining the TTN3 upgrade! I have just gone back to the TomTom site and replied with.....

"your automated response does not answer any of the points raised in my question!"

Hopefully the next reply will be more relevant!

Tom


P.S. I assume everyone else who submitted a copy of your letter to TomTom will also initially receive this automated e-mail response.

[Oldie]

David,

I have just received the following reply from TomTom Support Team: -

"Dear heer Davies,

Our apologies for the delay and thank you for your patience,

We are aware of the issue, "regarding the database"

Currently our developers are investigating this as we speak. We are trying to find a solution asap.

Please keep an eye on our website for information regarding this.


We hope to have answered your question to your satisfaction.
With best regards,

The TomTom Customer Support Team"

Let's hope that they get it right this time.

Richard

We see you’re using an ad-blocker. We’re fine with that and won’t stop you visiting the site.
Have you considered making a donation towards website running costs?.
Or you could disable your ad-blocker for this site. We think you’ll find our adverts are not overbearing!