No awesome news at this point. While I continue to appreciate the user interface overall, and the beautiful industrial design, I am no longer in love with this product. You can start with my honeymoon review (#1), and my 3 month slump review (#2) here before reading this (my 3rd) review.
- I am still irked by the cable situation: You can have the iPod control cable, or the traffic cable, but not both. What’s up with that, TomTom?
- Crappy FM transmission to the radio. Admittedely, this is an almost universally sucky problem unless you live on Mars, but in the bay area, and anywhere with a lot of overhead wires (electric bus lines, in particular) its essentially unusable. For folks without an aux port to their car stereo, it’s pretty much the only solution, and its sad that it doesn’t work.
- Now the really bad news: The connecting via aux port is bad too. I recently bought a new car with an aux stereo port, but there is a ton of high pitch over the 1/8th inch stereo plug (and I tried another cable, just to be sure). I’m now plugging my iPod directly in to my car stereo, and letting the TomTom’s internal speakers give out overly chatty directions. So much for allowing the TomTom / iPod control, and allowing the TomTom to act as a hub.
- Finally, disregard of traffic conditions. It’s easy enough to see 101 is a mess on my iPhone, but for some reason the TomTom can’t or doesn’t care. Using approximately the same traffic information, it seems to think that I can squeeze a 1.5 hour drive into 45 minutes. Rerouting? Why bother. Those solid red and yellow lines all over 101 can’t possibly mean a delay!
So, in conclusion (for now) I won’t recommend this device to friends. It works well enough getting me from A to B and I don’t intend to replace it anytime soon, but I’ll definitely borrow a friend’s Garmin or other device for a week next time I am in the market.
I’m getting a lot of referral traffic from GPSTrackLog, which has compiled a list of reviews for the TomTom 920T (and every other GPS device on the market), so definitely check them out for potentially more balanced reviews 
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I bought a new VW Bug this weekend (photos to come) … in the mean time, I’m posting a fun DIY hack for my GPS.
The Beetle’s windscreen is too far away for the GPS, and the dashboard is just a bit too curved and a bit too matte for the suction cup to stick. I attached a 3/4" dowel to a bell jar plastic lid with epoxy, wrapped the dowel with a couple of rubberbands to prevent spinning, and the suction cup stays attached to the lid nicely.
I can touch the GPS with my index finger while my hands are on the wheel.
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This is a continuation from my first review of the TomTom 920T, which i bought just before the holidays (Merry hoho to me). I’ve had some time to get used to my new toy, so I thought I would follow it up with some more thoughts.
Additional things to love:
- I’ve had almost no problems staying in tune with satellites. Granted I am in the bay area, but I still expected to drop out every once in awhile in rural areas like Woodside. I’ve only had some minor problems on the east side of the financial district, specifically when navigating around the Embarcadero centers.
- Great battery time. I have no quantitative numbers, but it seems to do a nice job.
- Nice night-colors. I only have my previous unit to compare to, but this is very usable and melllow, even in day time.
Additional things not to love:
- My previous review discussed iPod integration. In fact I have an iPhone, which makes a bit of a difference. The iPod Connect cable is not one of the “apple licensed and approved” devices for the iPhone. It does work, but only on the second try. When you plug it in you get a warning on the iphone that it’s not approved, and “would you like to go into airplane mode to minimize something or other”… um. No, but thanks. I dismiss the iPhone dialog box and move to the TomTom, where I navigate into the iPod control area and try to hit my driving playlist. As soon as I touch it, the TomTom reports that it lost the iPod connection. I have to un/replug the cable, dismiss the dialog box again, then it works fine. Every single time. Dunno if it’s a TomTom or iPhone thing, but irritating.
- Overly global and semi-sticky voice preference. Most of the time I know where I am going. I don’t need to hear turn by turn instructions from the TomTom telling me to keep to “two hundred and eighty Ess Bee [sb=southbound] towards San Ho-Tha [San Jose]” or “Towards San Frahn This-Kaa [san francisco]” So I keep it off most of the time. There appears to be no way to keep voice traffic alerts on while keeping instructions off. Occasionally I’ll jump to the traffic menu to have it speak traffic conditions, which it does quickly and smoothly. Unfortunately this toggles the global voice back on without warning.
- Overly chatty voice. There are several major and minor turnoffs along my usual route to work. The system seems to be unable to distinguish this so it helpfully tells me to “keep left then follow blah blah for another 2 point 2 miles” where it gives me another prompt to stay left. And another. The whole way down. Useful in an unfamiliar area, but not so much in a known area. This manifests in the text/list route browser as well: 35 miles of my trip is along 280, but the list shows it as about 10 different steps of X.X miles. No roll-up. There should be a “detailed v. simple” instruction mode.
- Stupid cabling. The worst annoyance is that the traffic antenna cable and iPod connect cable use the same port. So you have to choose which one you want. It already talks to my phone over bluetooth for traffic supposedly, but still wants that antenna plugged in. I don’t know why, and it may be an operator error. Anyway, this means I have the 1) power cable 2) the traffic cable, and 3) the ipod cable to manage. All of which have to be put somewhere, and between those three they fill up my rather small center console box when keeping them hidden.
The only thing that can’t be fixed with software updates is the cord management, so overall I am still very happy with this.
Update: Getting a little less happy with my TomTom in my third review
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After having my GPS stolen a few months ago, I finally bit the bullet and decided to go with the TomTom 920T.
Love:
- Beautiful industrial design. The gray plasti-rubber case has a delightful silky texture, is comfortable to hold in the hand, has enough heft to feel “serious,” yet not uncomfortably heavy.
- Awesome remote navigation
- Pretty good TTS and voice recognition (though it’s insisting on calling San Francisco “San Frahn This Kah” (spanish inflection?)
- Very tasty 3D view
- Lots of user generated features: A user can update POIs, make map corrections, report traffic cameras, and possibly other stuff I haven’t discovered yet. You can download these corrections as well, with a polite prompt to choose all changes or just those verified by TomTom. Coolbeans.
- On a similar note, the device can track driving times in aggregate and upload them to TomTom, allowing refined driving time estimates as the info flows in. Implementation poor though, see below.
- FM Transmitter, which is 6 degrees past awesome. In theory it will send tunes from the SD or built-in memory. It does NOT, however send voice calls, so see below.
- iPod integration: again, totally rocking in theory, but see below.
- Traffic. Sweet.
- Mac software. Just by having it at all, this is a cool thing, but… see below.
- [Update] I forgot to mention that I also love the teeny dorky mount. I was prepared to hate it after having a decently engineered gooseneck on my previous unit, sure that it would be annoying to use and adjust. In fact it works very well and the suction cup works well. It does put the unit out of easy reach, but because the remote works so well, that’s a non issue.
Hate:
- TomTom Home, the desktop software, is pretty bad. The interaction design is a thoughtlessly organized mashup of commercial offerings and device management. File management (music and photos, though why someone would want photos mystifies me) is awful, providing a perfect munge of anti-patterns in labeling, calls-to-action, list selection, and overall placement. The mental model is… psychotic, bordering on socio-pathic.
- On the same lines, I am really yucked out by the fact that during my first driving time log transfer, I have been stuck in a spinning marble of death mode for about 10 minutes. The modal and uncancelable dialog box claims to be uploading. The entire interface is dead to the touch (I can’t even bring it into focus it’s so zoned out right now.) Very poor. Perhaps a glitch, but first impressions count, and it prompted this post.
- FM Transmitter/Bluetooth stuff: While music and driving directions are sent to the stereo via FM transmitter, phone conversations are not. Additionally, the iPod integration requires a special dock connector to get through the transmitter, which is stupid since it’s already talking to the device via bluetooth. THis stupidity is possibly partly due to the BT implementation on the iPhone, and who knows what else, but it’s very disappointing. I’ve got my magic special connector on order, but that won’t help the lack of phone-to-stereo integration I hoped for.
- No printed manual. I’m generally all for no printed manuals, but this is a pretty complex little beastie, and there are some basic features that are simply undocumented in the getting started materials that should have been accounted for.
(Note: I did a followup review for this device.)
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Some dickless wonder broke into my car (parked 10 feet from my bedroom window) in the middle of the night, making off with my cheap but awesome GPS toy purchased from woot.com, and my fastrak transponder.
the only good thing i can say about it is they used a hanger or jimmy bar to get in, and nothing was damaged.
fuckers.
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