Re: BBC Watchdog

davek wrote:
> UK tv, consumer affairs program. Lady had problems with Navman and Tom Tom
> navigators.
> The tv showed her regularly being directed into cul-de-sacs, private
> industrial complexes, No Entry roads.
> The retailer had exchanged the units several times but in the end refunded
> her cash.
> I've never had such problems with MapSource (on the Garmin SP3).
> Is the mapping on those units pretty poor? (Or is she the jinx)?
> DaveK.
>
>
>

I was wondering the same thing after my daughter told me she'd been
watching it (I missed it). I was especially interested because I just
bought a TT Go500.

While I haven't had as many problems as the lady seems to have had, I
notice that in 10 days of ownership it's not 100% perfect. Although it
has never gotten me completely lost.

Some points

1. It suffers from the usual never picking the exact same route that you
would pick yourself. Often I can see why though. It usually IS q quicker
route it picks. IF there's no traffic. It doesn't seem to consider
traffic lights when choosing a route. But that's easy. If you know the
route take the turn & let it recalc. If not, it'll get you there.

2. The TeleAtlas maps are woeful. It's advertised as being door-to-door
navigation. yet it has no house numbers for my street (How to you get
door-to-door when it's resolution on address is postcode in builtup
areas. (The house is >100 years old btw... So there's no real excuse
there for mising the numbers on the street).

3. My street is mis-named.

4. Many streets are Un-named.

5. Even where it has POI's they're incomplete. And hard to search for.
And often in the wrong place (e.g. Travellodges. Such as one just north
of NewCastle, One over by Carlisle etc).

6. Streetnames don't match the postcodes.

7. When routing me it will often go round the block when it could have
taken a road straight.

8. The Traffic option is... Challenging... I have yet to make sense of
what it's trying to tell me. But I've experienced times when I've sat in
traffic while it tells me there's no problems. And seen problems while
travelling at the speed limit.

9. The handsfree phone keeps telling me there's no microphone. Not sure why.

10. It can't get the contact list from my phone (Nokia 7710). But that's
documented. I hope they fix that soon.

11. It often fails to download the traffic via the GPRS connection.
Again that could be my phone (Rebooting the phone fixes it).

12. The re-routing from traffic is strange to me. Tonight it took me
THROUGH the traffic before turning off the M4 to replan around the
traffic. Using the avoid took me off at J6, but I don't trust the A4
over a bad M4, so I stayed on & then the slow traffic wasn't there
anyway (M4/J6 @ 19:00 or thereabouts).


The support so far has been better than expected. But I have yet to have
any support questions answered successfully. Apart from telling me I
have to use the 'report map errors' instead of the 'question' form.
Which seems to end up at the same place. Sadly many people have
complained that things sent 2 yars ago still appear wrong.


Hmm... Some of those look familiar. We (Almost everyone here) used to
complain the same about Garmin & NavTech maps years ago. I do like the
hardware ideas though. BT connection, hands free phone and colour
touchscreen. If the maps were NavTech I think I'd be happier. (Their
maps seems to be better than TeleAtlas. At least in the UK. Certainly
the street numbering & Naming was better with navTech).

Oh... I was directed down a dirt track one day... But I was taking wrong
turns a lot & deliberately turned down what I thought was a dead end.
Turns out there's a track... Almost a driveway that runs back to the
main road. Driveable I guess at a pinch. That's as close as being
completely misdirected I've ever had.

I'm going planning on driving to Edinburgh from here in November to
watch the ALlBlacks thrash Scotland. Hopefully it won't direct me wrong
for that, but it should be pretty simple. I worry most about the M6
traffic myself...

Hamish,


.

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