i ordered a new tomtom because my GPS and i have been having a rocky relationship for a long time now. it would take FOREVER to get a GPS satellite link. i’m talking sync times of over 15 minutes sometimes. the screen is small and typing on it is always tricky for my fat fingers, so after much frustration, i’ve finally bit the bullet and bought a new tomtom.
what i didn’t know about the tomtom is that it is an embedded linux device. and, of course, if there’s linux, there’s a hack. opentom.org seems to have already found a way to expose the underlying OS. what exactly you gain from exposing linux on the tomtom is sort of up in the air. the most popular app appears to be an mp3 player, but i think that the tomtom model i have plays mp3s out of the box…
it looks like there are third party apps that allow you to watch video on your tomtom. the catch? you have to encode the video to the tomtom’s screen size. maybe i should start to script that sort of thing. i wonder if i can find a way to automate the downloads i have to automatically encode the video. that would be kind of cool…
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oh, that was fast. the tomtom is here. it looks pretty cool, i’m trying to update the software right now. we’ll let all of the tomtom stuff update first before i try to install any third party apps.
the new tomtom home software is a much more polished user-friendly piece of software. it doesn’t look like a windows 95 application anymore. kudos to tomtom for fixing their eyesore of an app. the update process to get the latest software is pretty easy and except for a server timeout problem, it has been without incident.
an interesting feature of this tomtom is the map share corrections. this allows other tomtom users to make corrections to maps which can then be shared to other tomtom users. it’s actually kind of neat.
what’s sort of annoying is that the default voices installed on the tomtom are pretty limited. you have to install voices from the CD to get more choices. this wasn’t the case on the tomtom go 920 by default, so maybe i’m a little spoiled, but i’m confused as to why tomtom has done this. i think it’s a blow to usability.
it’s nice that tomtom is letting me update my maps to the newest maps available for free. nice, but it’s a big download at over 1.5GB. oh well, they are throwing in the guam map updates too. i wonder how much the roads change in guam because it’s a 0.7MB update. =P
looks like it’s gonna take over an hour to download the map, so i guess i’ll let it download and install and see what happens after that.
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the download took a while, but was uneventful. it’s surprisingly just how much you can customize your tomtom. i guess that’s the big thing these days and tomtom is catering to personalization. i think it’s a novelty, but it’s a nice touch. the biggest thing for me was being able to add more computer voices and POIs.