Hello, Tomtom!

The GPS in the Cruze is suffering from a case of swollen battery syndrome, and it’s ancient so despite the fact it still works I think it’s time to replace it. The NavMan in the van pisses me off on a regular basis and is missing several features that would make my job a ton easier, so I decided I’d put the NavMan in the car and spring for a decent GPS.

I opted to give Tomtom a try, because they’re pretty well-regarded in the transport industry, and also because the touch screen felt really responsive when I played with the demo model.

The voice recognition takes a bit of getting used to, I’m not sure how much I’ll use it. The interface is much nicer than the (admittedly very very cheap) NavMan so we’ll see how it goes when we head into Melbourne on Monday.

I’m not sure how useful the traffic feature will be - NavMan gets its traffic information via FM band, which is hit-and-miss (the only time I really paid attention to it was leaving Brisbane, where the coordinates were stuffed up and the breakdown was on the detour rather than the main route!)… but Tomtom’s operates through a mobile phone paired with Bluetooth! This is doubly useless because I pair the phone with the car instead - I’ve no interest using my GPS as a Bluetooth receiver.

Why can’t they just let me put a Wifi SSID/key in and it can use the internet connection that’s always-on in the van? :(

Horsham VIC 3400, Australia

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Horsham VIC 3400, Australia

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