Sat Nav - Tomtom 5

I have now had a Sat Nav for nearly a year and really do not know where I would be without it. No more arriving in a strange city / town / village and trying to find a hotel or whatever. As long as you have an address, the Sat Nav will take you. They range in price from around £200 up to over £500. I initially went for Tomtom 3 based on a HP Ipaq 3715 pocket PC. Plugging all the bits together and installing the software was relatively simple. So after a short wait for it to find the satellites it was off to test. It performed superbly.

There are a few sites which publish POI files. A POI is a Point of Interest and range from anything from hotels to gyms. Some are included with the Tomtom package but to personalize your device many others are available from sites such as POI Handler www.poihandler.com The files are just numeric data so are normally very small. So now if you are motoring through France and you want to find an Auchan supermarket, just type it in and the device guides you there.

In August, I decided to upgrade to the new version 5 software. Although the Tomtom 3 software was good, it had quite a number of annoying habits. For instance it had a strange attraction for motorways. Even if the place you wanted to get to was just a few roads away it would try and get you to use a motorway. Tomtom 5 not only has the option of not using motorways but also offers the option of avoiding ones with tolls. All in all. the new software is well worth the upgrade price, added to which you get a set of detailed maps of Western Europe. The paperwork is a little on the thin side which could lead to several incidents of scratching heads. However after a short while everything should become clear and the device bursts into life.

My only negative point concerning the Tomtom organization is their support or more accurately, lack of it. To start with, to even send their support section an Email you have to register and then go through a very complicated interface. So, assuming that you have actually managed to send an Email, then everything should be fine - no way! Rapid response - no, about the slowest I have ever come across. I had a small problem and contacted them - it took 10 days to get the first reply. They made several suggestions but none of these worked. I then posted a question on the Gadget Detective site. No answers, just others telling how bad their support was. One person said that they had spent three hours on the phone to the Netherlands and still they could not sort out the problem. In the end I contacted HP, the maker of my pocket PC. I looked 4 hours later and there was the response - followed their instructions and the problem went. Would I still recommend their products - yes but make sure your supplier knows what they are selling so if you have problem, you can contact them.