According to UPS my TomTom GO 920 has been delivered. The next 3 hours, will be excrutiationg. Luckily my commute is only 15-20 minutes when traffic is bad, 'cause the apartment office closes at 6. I'll probably have some 3rd party apps for route tracing installed by the weekend.

This is going to make leading the drives and pre-running the routes SO MUCH EASIER.

Once I've thoroughly explored it's capabilities, I'll be specing out some TWR specific SW for it.

 

yay!! nice!! :D So is it one of those voice-activated ones? R u going to be talking to it while you're driving? .....like "Tom Tom, show me the nearest route to Starbucks?" :P haha

 

The website claims voice input, but I've read elsewhere that for the US that's still in the works (something about too many dialects/accents). But if I can, then yes. Hopefully it'll even let me name it, so I'll be saying "Ruby, where's the nearest Tully's?"

 

hahaha...that would be awesome! Technology these days! ........

One time ..I input the destination into the nav system in my car and it started telling me where to turn and stuff......first it was pretty cool to listen....with a girl's voice and all.......and then...at one point I took a short cut instead of following the pre-destined route that it set up......it started telling me to turn around....and it kept saying it again and again..........I had to actually stop the car to cancel it out...cuz I got really annoyed......haha......

But there were a lot of times it was pretty helpful...like when I went to Puyallup fair the first time....or when i went to find Pepboys in Everett...etc,..
I don't think I can find anything without my nav sys now....hahaha....:D

 

We used Shaun's 910 for the trip to 7 stock last year. The British Female voice is nice to listen too. However, I did learn that paying TOO much attention to the Nav unit is bad. It said turn right in 100 yds so I drove past the hotel entrance and onto the freeway. Made for an extra 8-10 minutes of rather eratic driving while I tried to follow her instructions which, for that particular instance seemd to be completely at odds with the law.

 

True true. Sometimes it can be completely off....especially with mine....the map disc is like made back in 2002 or something.....It doesn't show my house on there..it just shows a blank place....haha

 

I would hope that the unit that Kristopher just got is like mine where if you deviate from the suggested course it will auto-magically recalculate a new way to get there and start giving you new directions.

 

I got Robbie a Garmin StreetPilot C580 for Christmas last year and he loves it! It redirects routes and gives traffic updates and weather reports and all that stuff. Has bluetooth for a phone and also plays music. I think it does just about everything but give a massage! LOL On his you can pick different car styles for the icon and also different voices/accents. He picked the Australian lady, who happened to have been named Karen. I don't know if he has the ability to program in a specific route for it to follow, though. I would very much like that feature on my stock GPS.

 

Mine does stuff like that sometimes. Awhile back they were doing some sort of road repair a few miles from my house, which blocked off my normal route for about three months, so I had to take a detour. After I had been somewhere I pushed "home" and never bothered to cancel out the guidance when I got back to somewhere familiar. So, when I got close to home and was using the detour road, right at the bottom of a gully with steep drop-offs on both sides of the road (no shoulder as it is old country road) it tells me to "perform a legal U-turn." Meanwhile, the screen shows all the roads perfectly connecting up with where I want to be, so it's not like they were too small and obscure to register on the map. For some reason the GPS always chooses to avoid nearly the whole length of the little road I live off and prefers to send me either to the shortest route to the main road when I am leaving or making me bypass my road and go around on the way back, even though it is longer and backtracking. I don't know why, but Robbie's also does it and so does Mapquest when I have used them before.

 

Congrats Kris! Now we both have some new toys. Does yours come with traffic built in? My external traffic antenna is a bit cumbersome.

So any initial impressions?

 

Yeah, it auto-recalculates, and if I want to take a different route, I'm just a few taps away. Traffic requires either a data connection through the phone or an external antenna. Since my commute is 30 minutes if a gas tanker explodes on the freeway, and usually less than 10, I'm not too worried.

I love the built in light sensor that changes from daylight color scheme to night time colors. The format of the itinerary files (yes, I've already started poking around inside it's brain) is really simple, so I should be able to build them manually for now, and programatically later. My biggest complaint so far is the usual Linux user complaint. <rant>Compile for Linux, damnit! You have a Mac version of the software, which runs on the same damned kernal.</rant>

The new mounting pedastal sucks! Despite being smaller and lighter than the one that comes with the 910, it blocks my vision more. It doesn't have the twist-lock suction cup, just a standard one with one giant tab. The arm on the thing doesn't adjust at the base, only at the clip for the TomTom, and you plug power directly into the TomTom instead of the mount. Same goes for all the other connections you may want (iPod, external speaker, traffic, external GPS antenna). No external mic connection, so we'll see how the built in one works. Hopefully it's better than the one in the 910. Speach recognition works, sort of, but can be combersome. I just mounted the remote next to seat heater switches, sort of like the stock Nav control.

I like the fact that you can switch the keyboard from ABCDEF to QWERTY. Shaun, can the 910 do that? I type too much, for a living, and find the ABC keyboard layout very annoying.

On the kinda cool but could get annoying quick side, most national chains have their logos on board, so you see a little McDonalds "Golden Arches" or Chevron "chevrons", etc.

Entering routes is easy with Lat/Lon. I'll do a proper review in a few days.

 

The new GPS so sweet. To bad it wont tell us when there is a bike race on the same roads we are cruisin

 

Yes I can switch the 910 to a qwerty keyboard. Can you plug yours into your computer? That's where I do most of my route planning so I can use the real keyboard and cut/paste. Mine doesn't show the icons but I can download from the mainsite POI lists that merchants have created. I have the Tully's list loaded up.

Also did you get the "always up to date" map feature? I think it's a deal they are giving to people with the new models where your map of north america will always update for free when you plug in. I have to pay $90 if I want an updated map of NA. Not that most of the roads I drive are brand new or anything but it would be nice to be up to date.

 

Somwhere down the line there will be TWR software to help out.

Yeah, I can plug into my computer. I just can't run their software on my OS. Although, some of the cool stuff I've seen around my current job has me considering a switch back.

Don't know about "Always up to Date." I am guaranteed a free update if my maps are out of date right now.

My data service just got turned on on my phone about 20 minutes ago, so I'll be playing with that tonight, after I finish the route book. This new toy distracted me last night.

 

Let me know how the phone thing works out. I tried for 2 weeks and couldn't get it to connect. It was because the CS folks for ATT were morons and said my phone was not capable of receiving data or being used like a modem. I felt like I knew more about my phone than they did. If it wasn't capable why am I able to read about how to set it up in the manual and attempt to connect but then get blocked. Morons...

 

Will do. I'm really hoping I can sign up for the "Fuel Prices" service without the TomTom at Home SW. Otherwise, my next purchase will likely be Laptop. I doubt I can even run WinXP on my current computer (yes it's that old).

 

Well, the Speach Recognition routing is actually pretty cool. There are two options. One where it asks you for each piece of information one at a time, and one where you just say where you want to go. I haven't tried the say-where-you-want-to-go option yet, but I was able to use the "dialog" method quite easily yesterday.

Anohter cool, but not quite sensitive enough feature is the intelligent volume control. If you want, it will adjust it's volume to noise conditions. It definitelyworks, but I'd prefer it was just a little louder by default.

There's a power save feature which will turn off the screen when there are no directions to worry about (when running on battery) which is nice, but it turns on the screen a little to early. In fact, I'd like to make this function work while plugged in. That way you don't have video screen scrolling away infront of you when you don't need it.

Using the supplied adhesive disk to mount the unit to the dash is a big improvement in the don't-block-my-view-of-the-road department. The way it's set up, the TomTom now only blocks my view of the hood, which isn't too upsetting. The only draw back being that the nav unit is now tilted away from me at the top, and I'm concerned about glare in sunlight, but it may be a while before that becomes an issue.

The route calculations don't always come out the way I expect, but I've a pretty sure-fire way to deal with that, and it should be compatible with any unit that allows multi-waypoint routing, and takes coordinates.

The built in FM transmitter is pretty slick. Find clear station on the radio, program the freq into the TomTom, and adjust volume (on both TomTom and radio) to your liking. It's a decent interim solution while finish up the engineering on another project.

That's it for now.