Keep in mind that I was testing an early version of the product – in my opinion it was just not ready for marketing at the time.
Problem I had included:
1. When loading the software on the PDA, several error messages came up – none of them were of any actual importance, but as my company was supposed to provide the support for it I was concerned that users might call the help line for clarification and as result overload the help desk unnecessarily. I imagine this was resolved but at any case you should have received it pre-installed on the Mio so this issue is not applicable any more.
2. There were only two English speaking vices to chose from – a girl (called Philippa) with a British accent, and a man with a strong US accent – in addition to Romanian and some other ‘exotic’ languages, again I didn’t think this was right for the UK.
3. In general, the terminology used through-out the product was very strongly US-biased, these things do not go well in the UK. Also, the default country was not the UK – you had to change it to UK on the first use – which I thought wasn’t right either.
4. As for the product itself, there was a serious problem with the distance estimates – 100 meters according to it were around 30-40 meters in real life. Oddly this is not really a problem while driving, because you get used to it and compensate, but again I was concerned about the support calls this might generate.
5. On a couple of occasions the SatNav took me into private roads – one of them was actually closed-off by a barrier – but to be fair I suspect that this is really a problem with the Teleatlas maps rather than with the product itself.
6. There were other minor niggles, such as the letters on the touch-screen keyboard when choosing a street address being too tiny for finger use, and required the stylus – the TomTom’s on-screen keyboard had much larger keys.
7. The most important shortcoming as mentioned in my previous post was the lack of additional features other than speed limits – it had no TMC support, no speed camera locations, and did not support 7-digit postcode. All of these should have been resolved by now. Also, there was no real website for support or product updates – the iGo website at the time was very basic only provided general information about the company in Hungary.
iGo’s biggest asset was the compression technology they developed which allowed them to cram the whole of Europe at street level into a 1gb SD card. Also, they were the first to offer seamless transition between countries in Europe – you could drive from Hungary to London without changing maps or settings.
But I think that iGo were a relatively small company at the time, and did not have the resources required to produce a rounded and well finished solution that could take-on TomTom in the UK market. The deal with Mio would have given them a serious cash injection which is just what they neded in order to get the product right.
On another note, the loadable PDA software market is different than that of the turnkey devices, which is why the TomTom Go and TomTom One were such a success when first introduced – but this is a separate matter…
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Topic: New Sat Nav review (Read 2801 times)