Sheffield, with US support

I spent the last couple of days working in the Sheffield area. Well – when I punched the town name into the IBM travel reservation system, the nearest hotels I could find were in Sheffield, so I plumped for a Holiday Inn up there.

I’m not familiar with Sheffield, I’ve only ever passed through before, and I had a lot of work to do on Wednesday night so I can’t say that I saw much of the city. I didn’t know my way, but that wasn’t an issue because I had the TomTom with me.

Except… well… I picked Navigate to Point Of Interest, and chose the relevant Holiday Inn from the list. Once I was within 3 minutes of the place, I started to keep an eye out. I sailed past the sharp left that led up a ramp to the Royal Victoria Holiday Inn, following the satnav directions, and turned left further along the road onto a busy road which led me away from the premises. Then I tried putting the postcode and address of the hotel in, and that confused things further. The problem is that the hotel itself is about 40 feet above the main road, and to reach it you need to drive up a ramp that crosses another road via a bridge… basically the satnav was not set up to deal with this at all, and it took me 20 minutes to navigate back around to the entrance.

Things didn’t go any better at check-in, where I wasn’t greeted particularly warmly. The receptionist pointed me to the lift and said I was on the second floor. Up I went. Stepping out of the lift, I looked for directions to my room (260). There was a sign pointing one way[1] for rooms 221-258, and another pointing another direction for rooms 261-270. Spot the omission.

Wandered around and eventually found my room. Quite nice. Very modern, nice bathroom. I switched on the light by the desk… nothing happened. Then I found that the bulb was missing. I swapped a bulb from the light by the bed… nothing happened. Fine. I turned on the floor lamp by the desk… nothing happened. Ah, that had been unplugged. I could see why: two sockets by the desk, one of which was taken by the power for the broadband hub. I left the the lamp unplugged, and powered my laptop instead.

Next, I connected the laptop to the network cable on the desk… no connection. Hmm. I rebooted, and still wasn’t given an IP address. Disabled my firewall, rebooted the router, tried various things. Nothing. I called reception, and they put me through to the support department, in the US.

- welcome to Guesttek support, can I first please take the telephone number of the hotel where you are staying?
- errr… yes… just let me find it…
- it should be printed on the phone, sir
- you’d think so, wouldn’t you? it isn’t!
(pause whilst I scrabbled through the papers by the phone, which was positioned by the bed – found it)
- OK, the number is +44… hello? hello?
(they had cut me off)

Excellent.

At this point I decided to use my 3G card instead.

Room service arrived. The lady asked if everything was alright with my stay.
I explained that I didn’t have a network connection, and I hadn’t been able to find the room.

5 minutes later, whilst I was eating, the telephone rang – “Mr Piper, would you like me to put you through to the helpline?”. Well, were they going to cut me off again? I also pointed out that the phone was by the bed, on the other side of the room from the desk. The receptionist expressed surprise – wasn’t there a phone on the desk? No, definitely not. Look, I said, I’ve got work to do and dinner to eat – leave it.

I then had a frustrating evening fighting with an iffy 3G/GPRS connection. Not great.

In the morning, there was a telephone charge on my bill. I can only assume that they were trying to charge me for calling their support line. I don’t make a habit of filling out hotel comment forms, but in this case, I left a short essay detailing the inadequate lighting, network and directions to my room… haven’t heard from the hotel yet.

I had just as frustrating a time trying to get out of Sheffield with computer-aided support as I had trying to find my way in, but at least I made it to the office on time.

[1] I don’t actually remember the precise numbers – but there was a gap where 260 should have been.

Technorati Tags: guesttek, Holiday Inn, hotel, satnav, Sheffield, working

In-car FM transmitter for TomTom

For a while now, I’ve been toying with the idea of getting one of the small FM transmitters for the car, so that I can use my little USB stick MP3 player, or listen to MP3s from the TomTom 910. They used to be illegal in the UK, but the ban was lifted in December.

At the weekend, I discovered that Amazon UK were listing them for 1p. Couldn’t be right, could it? So I ordered one (they come from a third party supplier), half expecting the order to be cancelled. Postage was £4.50. It arrived this morning!

I’ve not tried it yet. It can either take a battery, or be plugged in to the lighter socket in the car… which would be an issue if I wanted to use it with the TomTom, since that uses the same power source. Still, for the price, I think this is a neat accessory.

Ironically, I just read on yourNav that TomTom announced a new mount with an inbuilt FM transmitter at CES today, and may now abandon the plans for the full Bluetooth car kit for the new TomTom GO series. I don’t agree with the issue that yourNav raises about making a choice between the CD/radio and the TomTom – I could always listen to music from the TomTom. It is just a shame that I would potentially have to spend money on a new mount, though… for now, I don’t think I’ll be investing in this option, but I might change my mind later.

Technorati tags: Amazon, TomTom, TomTom 910, FM transmitter, radio, yourNav, products, satnav, satellite navigation, gadgets, CES

Does satellite navigation make us dumber?

It sounds as though Adrian might have been right when he blogged about the erratic behaviour of motorists who have satellite navigation devices.

Yahoo! News reports that some drivers rely on their in-car navigation so much that they lose the ability to use common sense and spatial awareness - and end up driving into rivers… (amongst other blunders).

I have to agree with the Blaupunkt spokesperson quoted in the article:

“If a traffic light is red it’s obvious you have to stop even if the satnav says ‘drive straight on’,” he said. “People who drive into rivers and then blame their satnav are just too humiliated to accept blame themselves.”

Originally found via Tech Digest.

Technorati tags: GPS, satnav, satellite navigation, TomTom

Media on the TomTom GO

Here’s something I didn’t know I wanted – a media player for my TomTom GO 910.

I was reviewing my blog stats earlier, and noticed that someone had found my site with the search term “TomTomGO+910+playlist+software”.

Now, it’s true that I’d personally like an app to enable me to create or edit playlists on my TomTom. Right now, as I understand it, you create a .m3u file in Windows Media Player, and then upload it to the device – which drags in all the MP3s behind it. Cool, but doesn’t help me to create custom playlists from the music already on the device. So, I’m still interested in this topic.

Curious, I tried the search on the same string, and found a number of references to media players for TomTom devices.

It appears that there are two apps that enable video to be viewed on the TT: Media Studio from Makayama (which apparently converts DVDs for you, but from what I’ve read on various forums may have issues with ongoing TT firmware upgrades); and Media Center from MobilNova (which will play AVIs and MPEGs, and seems a little “safer” in terms of compatibility with firmware changes).

It seems that both apps by default won’t let you watch video on the move, but that feature can be disabled.

This is funky. I don’t currently have a portable media player (other than my laptop, I suppose). Clearly there’s no point in trying to use this whilst driving, but any passenger could get some use out of it.

I haven’t sprung for either of these apps yet. Can’t find any reviews of them, so I’m slightly nervous. Pretty cool, though, and I’m a total junkie for anything new like this

Technorati tags: TomTom, satnav, media, video, DVD, MPEG, playlist, MP3, music, TomTom GO 910

Podcasts and music on a Saturday morning

On the (lengthy) drive in to work this morning, I was able to catch up on some podcasts, courtesy of the TomTom 910 MP3 player.

The Shortcuts series from IBM is very good. It is easy to digest, interesting and engaging – recommended. I also listened to an old-ish episode of Taking Notes from earlier in the year, featuring Ed Brill; a couple of developerWorks podcasts; and some stuff from IBM’s internal podcasting site.

When I felt like some music, I had a spin through some tracks I found on Fred Wilson’s excellent AVC blog, which I’ve followed for a long time. A particular revelation was the Ray Lamontagne cover of Crazy by Gnarls Barkley. Unlike Fred, I can’t stand the original: I hate the musical style.This version let me listen to the lyrics and enjoy the lazy guitar – it was great.

Incidentally, if you feel like exploring Fred’s blog further, I also love the song George Romero by the Sprites that he featured back in May. A little silly, but also quite a grower.

Finally, combining the IBM and music themes – you really should check out some of my favourite musical IBMers. Lisa Swain and Seven Ender were both featured in our internal Battle of the Bands podcast earlier in the year, and I am completely hooked on their sounds. You can hear both of them via their sites, so it is fairly easy to dip in and see what you think.

Technorati tags: podcast, IBM, Lotus, Lotus Notes, developerworks, MP3, music, TomTom, Seven Ender, Lisa Swain, Sprites, Ray Lamontagne, AVC

New TomTom mount arrived

The replacement car mount for my TomTom GO 910 arrived the other day.

The change appears minor. The new mount is shown on the left, and has an extra lip protruding behind the connector. The old mount on the right doesn’t have this (more shots of the mount on Flickr).

The 910 snaps satisfyingly into place in the new mount, and seems slightly harder to remove. I haven’t taken it out in the car yet, but hopefully this suggests that it will not drop the connection like the old one did.

Again, kudos to TomTom for going ahead and replacing these for free.

Technorati tags: tomtom, satnav, gps

More on the TomTom 910 – it gets better

Since getting my TomTom, I’ve experienced intermittent connection problems with the windscreen dock… basically it would not always keep a good connection, so I’d have to press it down whilst driving. It was irritating. One of the firmware updates stopped it from powering off when it lost the connection (the worst part about the problem at first), so it hadn’t affected me hugely, but it was an annoyance.

I just read on yourNav.com that if your TT x10 came from one of the early batches, you can now order a replacement dock for free. Just type in your serial number and they will ship it out. I just registered for mine. I think this is excellent, and a good move by TomTom.

In other news (also via yourNav.com), there has been another firmware update which adds support for the soon-to-be-released Car Connect (Bluetooth car kit) and the RDS-TMC receiver, both of which I’m eagerly awaiting…

Technorati: tomtom, gps, satnav, gadgets

TomTom updates, and the World Cup

During the week, I got an email from YourNav.com (the successor to the old MyTomTomGo site) saying that a new firmware for the TomTom x10 series had been released.

This is a very helpful update. I currently have a problem whereby the TomTom switches itself off at random when driving. I’m pretty sure the mount is faulty and I’ve opened a problem ticket with TomTom themselves, but in the meantime this firmware update prevents the unit from switching itself off if it loses the connection with the mount when driving. It’s a sticking-plaster update (having the thing run its battery down while driving is not ideal), so I need to pursue the replacement mount option as well.

When I downloaded the update, I noticed a little World Cup panel at the bottom left of the TomTom HOME window. So, I clicked it.

You can get free voices, colour schemes, points of interests and maps associated with the World Cup. I downloaded the free Sven voice. It’s amusing. I’m impressed that TomTom have gone to these lengths, and this was a nice bonus.

Full trip test

Last night I was able to give the TomTom a decent test drive. Here’s what I found:

• The automatic switching to night mode (darker dimmer colours) worked fine, although it seemed to take quite a long time after dusk to kick in.
• Minor niggles with the MP3 player:
  • No way to skip through parts of a track (that I can find), you can only skip over them to the next track.
  • No way of using the remote to skip tracks, you have to reach up to the screen.
  • No way to see the track name without going into the jukebox itself.
• The Kate computer voice seems to stumble over some road names, particularly ones with more syllables – they come out gabbled. And she can’t say “Guildford”
• There’s a stretch of the A3 around Tolworth that is marked as a 30 limit when it is a 50 limit. Amusingly, there’s even a safety camera warning for the 50 limit, but the unit still thinks it is a 30 limit on the road itself.

I would really have liked to have had GPRS on my phone, since we hit traffic quite a few times. In the end I turned off, and the TomTom worked out that I’d gone in another direction and worked out a new route from there. I love this feature!

Amazing the number of safety cameras on the way into London. The thing pinged me every few minutes! Barely any time to enjoy my music.

Overall, I’m even more impressed now that I’ve given it a better test. Just one or two niggles that will hopefully be ironed out over time – but this is a great piece of kit!

All nav’ed up

Yesterday morning, my new TomTom Go 910 finally arrived. To say that I was excited would be an understatement.

I’m really impressed. It’s a nice compact unit, although slightly weighty due to the 20Gb hard disk lurking within. Plenty of stuff included in the box – a USB dock for the PC (the 910 is pictured sitting in the dock), external mic and aux audio cables for the car, a remote control, and a soft case (not shown above). The case is made of the same kind of material as my new laptop bag, and has a side which has some hard material inserted in order to make it rigid against the screen.

Bearing in mind that I’m a GPS virgin, I had a few issues with getting up-and-running…. Having unpacked the unit, I plugged it in to charge. The mains power connector to the dock, incidentally, has a 2-pin US plug which folds down and into which you can insert either a UK or Continental “plate” (supplied), so it should be usable in the US and across Europe. Whilst it was charging I thought I’d install the TomTom HOME software and start to have a play with it.

The manual stated that the unit should be switched on outside to get a nice clear GPS signal for the first use. Well, I have to admit that I turned it on indoors the first time around, such was my excitement – so I’ll come back to the GPS signal part in a second. First time on, it presented a number of screens which asked about geographical location, time, etc. and then offered to play some movies to illustrate how the user interface worked. I love the UI – very intuitive, and the screen seems to be nicely touch sensitive and to detect a finger touch in the right places.

Once I’d got it going and played with the menus a bit, I realised that it wasn’t going to be able to plan me a route without first getting a GPS lock. So out I went. The manual stated that the first time, it can take about 5 minutes to get a lock, and that if it takes more to go to an area avoiding tall buildings and trees. I stood outside the front of our building for nearly 10 minutes without any luck (it could see one or sometimes two satellites, with a weak signal), by which point it was getting windy and wet so I abandoned the effort.

The software is nice. The first thing it did was to upgrade both itself (the PC software) and various things on the unit itself. After that, I was able to poke around and see what was installed. What I didn’t realise for some time was that I needed to login to my tomtom.com account and tell them that I now had a 910, and register my serial number. Once I’d done that, I could click the Login button in TomTom HOME and get access to the Plus features. What I didn’t realise until later was that there’s also the My GO 910 icon on the left of the HOME screen which will actually let you operate the 910 from the Windows software. Pretty nice. Whilst I was waiting for the opportunity to go out, I uploaded a bunch of photos and music:

Couple of points about the photo and music functions:

• I uploaded the photos at native resolution, virtually straight off my camera. They are anywhere between 2 and 8Mb in size. Seeing how long it takes the 910 to display them (it took a good couple of minutes to draw the screen of thumbnails in the screenshot), I’m going to resize them smaller in future.
• The music feature talks about playlists, but what it doesn’t tell you at any point is that if you just add a load of MP3s (it only recognises MP3s, and not WMA or M4U files) without doing so via a playlist, when you come to want to play the music you can only do so by selecting an artist or album, so it is not very flexible. I’m going to have to build a playlist in Windows Media Player or something, then re-upload my music.
• The software doesn’t recognise UNC network paths (e.g. \\myhomeserver\music) – you have to map a drive, and then it will work.

One other thing I did whilst waiting for a full charge was to play with the voices. I deleted a load of the ones that were shipped (I don’t speak Thai or Bulgarian, for example… they are supplied on the CD so I could always add them back later). I also downloaded the John Cleese voice for the cost of a few Euros. That’s quite fun, although since it is a human voice, it obviously does not have the capability of reading out street names, text messages and warnings. Every time you select such a human voice, you get warned that it can’t read these things and asked if you want to choose a computer voice – annoying. The other annoying thing is that you get the same joke about him not helping you with your bags every time you reach your destination – funny the first couple of times, but it grates after a while.

Eventually I knew I had to get the GPS working. It was raining by this point. I went and sat in the car (opportunity to play with the dock) for half an hour. Still no GPS fix.

I should explain at this point that we live very close to Farnborough airfield – on the landing path, in fact. Radio transmissions here are terrible.

Eventually I tired of waiting, and went for a drive. Within 50 yards of home, the TomTom sprang into life. I pulled over and typed in a random local destination. Mr Cleese began directing me there. It was all working fine. The volume on the internal speaker is pretty good… I have the unit mounted on the right of the dash and most of the time I don’t need the volume above 55-60%, although at speed it does get a bit drowned by road noise at that level.

On that first trip out, I discovered a mapping problem – a one-way system that has been in place for over a year now was evidently not known to the TomTom, so I ended up ignoring its instructions. Good opportunity to see it re-routing me, which it did pretty quickly, within seconds of me turning away from the one-way system. Anyway, once you login to the tomtom.com site, you have the option of reporting map problems – so I did that this morning. I found a Point of Interest that is wrong (a Little Chef that closed a couple of years ago), but I’m not so sure how to report those.

I tried the Bluetooth functionality with my phone, and having done so I’m told the internal microphone is very bad. So, if I’m intending to use that more often, I’ll be fitting the external microphone in the car somewhere. One issue I have is that my phone doesn’t have a GPRS subscription, so at present I can’t use things like the weather and traffic updates. Hopefully I’ll be able to try those soon.

Another small annoyance is that my car stereo has no auxiliary input socket, so if I want to hook up to the car speakers I’ll have to think about one of those small FM transmitter things that people use for iPods and walkmans.

Today I found some websites where is is possible to download additional Points of Interest. I was a bit surprised that choosing Shops in the existing POIs only showed me Harrods and one other chain. Supermarkets seemed more useful. Naturally I already know my way to the local Tesco and Sainsburys, but I downloaded the POIs anyway, in case we find ourselves on holiday somewhere and need some guidance.

So I’ve still not given it a proper workout, but I’m pretty impressed so far. We went out on one longer drive yesterday and saw things like the road speed detection (it tells you what the limit is on the road you are travelling on, and your current speed, going red if you go over the limit)… and the safety camera warnings. I’ll have to report back as I learn more. This satnav should be hugely useful for work.

Update: there’s a small discussion going on about this over on the YourNav forums.

Google Maps no good for navigation

I’d like to make the observation that Google Maps absolutely sucks as a route planner.

I’m not sure how popular this suggestion will be, but let me tell you why I think that way…

This weekend I needed to drive from Farnborough to Walthamstow, and after that on to East Croydon. I confidently expected to get to Walthamstow by driving clockwise around the M25 and heading into London on the A10 towards Enfield. Google Maps wanted to send me into London on the A40, and across on the North Circular.

1. There’s no way of selecting particular types of road as a preference over others.
2. There’s no way of telling Google Maps to route around / avoid areas.
3. There’s no way of selecting average speeds, fuel costs, etc. (although this is arguably not necessary)
4. The printouts are awful. Truly, truly terrible. It doesn’t even print out the line along which you will be travelling clearly. There’s so little control, it makes me want to weep.

Microsoft AutoRoute (I’m still on AR 2001, haven’t upgraded to MapPoint or anything newer) not only chose my expected route on the way there, but got the costs, timing, etc. virtually perfect, and also let me print out clear maps at a variety of levels of detail. I hate being indebted to Microsoft software, but in this case, it is clearly better.

Of course, if my TomTom satnav had arrived last week, as Expansys told me 3 times that it should (!!!), then I wouldn’t have been in so much agony in the first place…

Oh, I also discovered that the cross-city route from north to south London via the Blackwall Tunnel is a terrible way to spend a Sunday afternoon in May. 2 hours to travel 10 miles. Should have gone back out to the M25 and followed it round clockwise, but I decided to go with the Autoroute option…

TomTom 910, still waiting

I’ve noticed an upsurge in visits to my blog from searches on the topic of the TomTom 910, undoubtedly because they are now on the market.

We’re still waiting. Ola ordered mine a few weeks ago from Expansys. According to the nice lady on the phone on Monday, they are due to have them in stock today. Fingers crossed that mine will be one of the ones shipped.

If you are interested in learning more, I’ve been hovering around the yourNav forums to find out what I can before I get my hands on the actual unit. I’ll post more when I’ve got it and started using it…

Update 5th June 2006… I’ve been noticing a lot of traffic to this post. I do actually have my 910 now. Go find out what I think about it in these other posts:

• All nav’ed up
• Full trip test
• TomTom updates, and World Cup

Update 13th December 2006: This is easily my most popular post, but I’ve written a lot about my TomTom, so I would encourage you to read more of my posts. I’ve now got a whole category where my TomTom posts are collected.