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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Best earbuds I have ever owned. If you’re an iPhone user, you can send these puppies over to ultimatebuds who will mod them with an apple cable with microphone/pushbutton thingy.
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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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Got this POS memo from City Park a few days ago wrt my iPhone being stolen from my car in their garage @ 475 Sansome in the SF Financial District. As noted in the post to which I am linking, they have one thing to say “NOT OUR PROBLEM.”
I get that, assholes. I read the contract posted 8 times on the wall. I read the contract on the back of my ticket. And I certainly couldn’t have missed it when I beseeched the valets (yes, valets. in a locked garage. one of whom stole my phone but it’s “not our problem”) to let me look in my car or do anything helpful, but who could only stand their drooling, picking lint out of their assholes, and pointing at the posted contracts on the wall stating “it’s not our problem.”
Thanks for the great customer service, and the compassion. Thanks for dealing with this matter so quickly. Thanks for doing thorough background checks and actually looking into a matter that damages your brand reputation.
Oh, and by the way, thanks for hedging your memo by rewording what I stated in my report to “phone MAY have gone missing.” What I actually said was that it was taken from my car which I left in the hands of one of your fast fingered valets.
Did I say thanks? I meant fuck you. In the heart. With a rusty, dull knife.
I may need to park there again if I work in our downtown office, but you can bet your ass I’ll take pictures of every thug you’ve hired and bleed on the internet about every surly encounter I have with you.
(click for bigger)
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I am absolutely floored by how cool this is… and also how scary. I did what it said, and about 5 seconds later my phone had installer.app on it. Amazing work.
A crew of hackers (including hdm/metasploit, rezn, dinopio, drudge, kroo, pumpkin, davidc, dunham, and NerveGas) have introduced a one-touch instant jailbreak for both iPhone and iPod touch. The jailbreak opens your iPhone for full disk access and installs Installer.app so you can add pretty much any third party application you like.
To use it, open Safari and point your browser to jailbreakme.com (which we aren’t linking to so folks won’t install this by accident, but you are prompted to confirm). Once there, read the directions, scroll to the bottom, and tap Install AppSnapp. If Safari disappears and you return to the main Home screen, you’re good. Just wait a minute more for your unit to restart–don’t touch anything until you see the slide to unlock screen. If Safari hangs, just quit out (press and hold Home for 4-8 seconds) and try again.
Once you get to slide-to-unlock, go ahead and unlock your iPhone or iPod touch. You’ll return to your home screen which will contain a new Installer.app icon. If you’ll want to ssh into your unit, install the BSD subsystem, Community Sources, and then install Open SSH–you may need to upgrade Installer.app (thanks Ste). With Open SSH and sshfs (part of Mac Fuse), you can open Finder windows that offer direct drag and drop access to your phone or touch.
The jailbreak really is as easy as it sounds. I restored my iPod touch and jailbroke it just a few minutes ago and it worked great. (Read More)
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So I was planning on ignoring the iPhone jailbreak thing until I get more time to play with it… except that it won’t even sync now. I’m getting a lovely Error -1426. WTF-ever that means. The restore is not working either. So I’ve all the crap from my iPhone software updates directory to force a newish cleanish install to see what happens. I have to travel tomorrow, and if I don’t have podcasts someone is going to get cut.
Update: Yay. That worked. The missfired iJailbreak + iFuntastic must have written something broken in my backups. It’s syncing now. No jailbreak for me tonight though. I want my damn podcasts for trip with no bullshit.
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Today is not my day for electronic devices I guess. A work buddy told me that I could use either iJailbreak or iFuntastic to jailbreak and get intaller.app running on my phone Yay.
I started with iJailbreak. It didn’t work, because the script was trying to call an out of date disk reference, and I am not clever enough to go fix the broken references.
So I did a pristine install to 1.1.1 and tried iFuntastic. This one failed on me as well for some reason. Even though the phone works fine and reports v 1.1.1, iFuntastic thinks I am running 1.0.2 for some reason still, and as such is probably trying to do the wrong thing. Not sure exactly how to fix this one yet either. Some combination of shredding iFuntastic prefs, possibly doing another complete phone restore, and crossing fingers. Maybe iJailbreak will be fixed tomorrow and just work.
Waa. I want my iFlickr back.
I know I have no business bitching about the user experience of the incredibly entrepreneurial, successful, rapid and interative community effort that is making this stuff possible, but in this instance I am a relative consumer, don’t want to be hassled (but still want the benefit, shut up), and am being frustrated in my attempts.
Waa. </waa>
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As we speak. I hope it doesn’t break. I got *really* busy at work for a few weeks and wasn’t paying attention to The State Of The Brick. I hope my phone survives.
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