About 2 years ago I switched from a simple TomTom Go to a Garmin Nuvi 2370LT. The reasons for the choice were:
- Nice slim design like a large mobile phone, instead of the bulky, thick TomTom designs.
- Longer battery life: 4 hours instead of most TomTom’s very limited 1 or 2 hours, thus allowing more sensible use also when walking in strange cities.
- Built in blue-tooth hands-free capability (although I must confess I never used it as I already had another kit in my car).
- TMF reciever built into the power cable allowing for traffic information to be read in by the navigation software and alternate routes suggested, even though it came with a separate antenna wire which needed to be draped out over the dashboard somehow.
I do like some things such as the ability to customize the information provided a bit further so that for example altitude is shown when driving in mountains. And I liked the option to log the trip although that option is a bit too limited as it does not allow properly setting an interval for a trip, which would be sensible on a long highway trip or when moving very slowly. And I liked the ability to plan trips with multiple waypoints, although this for some reason sometimes didn’t work, and this option is limited as you have to choose which waypoint is the next destination instead of the software identifying that you are still somewhere between one and the next waypoint and thus guessing which the next is and then just going down the trip as planned from that point onwards.
However the Garmin has some serious flaws:
- I never did like the Garmin menu structure. It is chaotic with too many important options hidden in illogical places and way too deep in the menu system.
- As said, the trip planning sometimes didn’t work at all, simply loosing the trip entered.
- Adding your own points of interest is much more difficult and is limited to more or less adding everything into a single favourites file, compared to TomTom’s approach where you add separate sets of POI’s as separate files with their own icon.
- Very limited availability of other voices and the like to personalize your system.
- Adding a destination to an ongoing trip sometimes worked correctly, inserted the nearer destination into the trip in correct sequence, but sometimes would append the nearer destination at the end of the trip.
- Garmin does not intelligently recalculate a route if you make a wrong turn but will insist too long on getting you back on the originally planned route.
- Even if set to choose the fastest route, it often gives strange preferences to inside roads over circular highways thus potentially making your drive through a city to get to the other side. This will always take longer than taking the circular road due to all the traffic lights and congestion on city streets.
- And most importantly, the thing is just simply dangerous. In places where there are longer exit lanes parallel but separate to a highway, it will put you on the exit lane, and then let you re-enter the highway at the end of the section. This is very dangerous, particularly in areas where you have not been before, as it is confusing, forces you to exit the highway into a slower lane, makes you have to address outgoing and entering traffic two times, and then makes you reenter the highway from the slow lane.
I have corresponded with Garmin support shortly after buying the device, and after the first of several near misses due to this serious flaw, but even with the last update this serious safety issues has not been addressed. Garmin clearly are not concerned with the safety of their customers. Their attitude on this is just ridiculous as this issue could be quite easily be fixed with just a few lines of code so that the program looks a bit farther ahead and thus avoids unnecessary “exits””. I can only advise all Garmin users who suffer an accident due to this poor bit of programming to sue them for all damages and more.
For me the last firmware update was the final straw: after the update the device kept saying it did not have sufficient memory at random moments and restarting. There was ample free memory, so another symptom of quite poor programming. And that is unacceptable when trying to traverse the spaghetti road network of a city like Florence, Italy. Combined with the serious safety issue mentioned above and the poor performance in navigating the inner city of Florence, I decided it was time to give TomTom a 2nd chance.
The TomTom VIA 135 is a reasonably compact device even if a lot clunkier than the Garmin. The anti-reflective screen is actually an improvement compared to the glare on the Garmin screen. Battery life is less at just 1 to maybe 2 hours. It does have a micro-SD card slot although I still have to figure out what can be done with that. Documentation is not exactly stellar. The menu structure is a significant improvement over the Garmin. However it is a bit of a step back from the older TomTom Go which for example allowed you to adjust your usual speed settings for different types of roads to allow more accurate trip duration estimates. Also TomTom does ask whether you want to arrive at a particular time but does not offer the opposite: planning a trip with a given departure time. Trip planning for that matter is quite deficient, allowing only 2 or 3 waypoints along a planned route. That is really insufficient. Also the information presented cannot be adjusted as much as with the Garmin. E.g. no option to show altitude and no separate cockpit screen showing all values from the GPS and derived values. It does have the hands-free blue-tooth option build in. The one thing which finally pulled me over the line was however the ability to get a TMF receiver in the power cable even if this has to be bought as a separate option at too high a price, and the better navigation with no exit-lane un-safety issues. That, overall does make me a lot happier.
However, some very strong advice to TomTom is in order:
- You have to compete with the likes of the Samsung S3 and the Garmin Nuvi. So make the things as compact and thin and give it at least 6 hours of battery life so that it can be used when walking through Rome or so.
- The cable with TMF receiver should be standard on all devices which can work with it, and should not add more than 15 or 20 Euro’s max to the price instead of the current 45-50 Euro’s as separate option.
- Such simple things as trip logging (including setting different logging intervals depending upon speed), a cockpit screen showing all GPS derived info including altitude, and improved ability to adjust the information shown in the driving mode should be standard options, easy to find in the menu system.
- Trip planning should be dramatically improved allowing an almost unlimited number of waypoints, including planned departure date and time and planned stopover times at waypoints. Certainly the micro-SD card should allow an unlimited number of planned trips and trip logs to be held.
- I could also see the micro-SD card being used to load a planned trip or a list of POI’s from e.g. Google Earth or Google Maps as e.g. KML file and the onboard TomTom software either using that directly or translating that to its internal format. After all the current TomTom’s seem to run under Linux so all the tools are quite readily available to do that. For that matter, maybe also add the option to program some apps by including e.g. Python 3.x ?
- Too many add ons have become too expense paid add ons. The prices of add ons should be reduced and more add ons such as POI’s, voices, car symbols, etc., should be free. In this area I really see a dramatic decline in what used to be on offer and what is currently on offer.
For now, in my book TomTom wins out on better navigation software and in particular on safety even if on quite a number of other aspects Garmin seem more advanced. But I do hope both Garmin and TomTom take note as competition is a good thing.