Monday, August 23, 2004
Son of Road Trip - TomTom Navigator Bluetooth GPS reviewed
Posted by Doug Raeburn in "HARDWARE" @ 09:00 AM
Figure 11: Piquing your interest…
If you wish to select your destination from POIs, TomTom presents you with the screen shown in Figure 11. It displays icons for the most common types of POIs, or you can tap on the "More…" icon to see more types.
Figure 12: I'm on the highway to heaven…
Once you choose the type, the POIs are displayed starting with those closest to your current position. You can also search by name, as shown in Figure 12.
Figure 13: We have contact…
While many competitive products call up contacts right from within the navigation screens, TomTom does so through the Contact application. Find the desired contact and pull up the tap and hold menu. You can either display a map of the address or have a route created to that address. And this functionality is also brought into the leading "Super PIMs", Pocket Informant and Agenda Fusion.
Figure 14: Demonstrating avoidance behavior…
Once TomTom has calculated a route, you have several options for changing it. First, if you just don't like the chosen route at all, you can tap on the "Alternative" icon, and a new route will be determined.
For more specific adjustments, TomTom displays "avoid me" icons for major highways included in its route, and you can tap on any of them to get a new route that doesn't include that road. This approach makes it easy to choose the highways that you're most likely to avoid with any given route. To select specific roads beyond what TomTom automatically displays, an expandable box is provided to do so directly on the map screen.
Figure 15: Another @#$*&^! detour…
There is also an interesting method to deal with short detours. If you run into a road block and the length is either visible or posted, you can tell TomTom how long the detour is, and it will attempt to get you around the road block and back on its calculated route just beyond the road block. Living in the snow belt, we have a saying that we have two seasons, winter and construction, so I'm sure this would be very useful for me.
