Garmin 920
One of the big advertised features is the speech recognition. This is pretty weak imo. It barely works and almost not at all if the car is in motion or if there is any ambient noise and it still takes to much touching of the screen and prompting through filters to get from start to finish. It also doesn’t work with POI or anything else just street address entry.
I would have gone another way and let people tie voice clips to actions, touch the device or key work activation, say “go home now”, or “find closest gas station” audio feed back confirmation, and go.
It’s nice that they shoe horned the features in but it’s total alpha build quality, maybe a higher quality mic with better noise canceling will work more efficiently but even a in dead silent house from two feet away it was a bit spotty (I’m native US english speaker, maybe it’s better if you use UK english 
).
The text to speech on street names is pretty awful, I had to turn it off. I have had a number of devices including copilot that where much MUCH better at the text to speech stuff. Tom tom need to seriously overhaul their algorithm for this since it’s pure software. Just to nit pick it would be nice if somebody taught it how to say ‘i’phone but I don’t get the feeling there is not a lot of Apple love over there.
So in short it’s a bit of mixed bag for a high end device, but all GPS seems to be this way these days. Hopefully a truly revolutionary device will come out some day instead of the patch works of compromise we have to make today with any device. That said I’m happier with it now then I was yesterday without one (my old phone based treo one finally died).
I have two cases open with tom tom, one for a bug where backups fail and one for the expired plus services.
So far they the responses on the backup issue have totally sucked. All they can offer is a manual process, that doesn’t really address or explain the problem at all. They would like to point the finger at Av or firewall software but that is not a issue on the PC or my Mac (and I opened the case for it on the mac and specified the OS, so um hello?… they seem pretty undertrained and unmotivated to fix actual root problems). I can’t say I’m impressed with the quality of their support and I have pretty low standards.Looks like yet another device where the best support is through web forums and Google. Wee.
I have used maybe 8 different GPS and software packages over the last 10 years. I have yet to find one that really rocket my world for every step forward it seems there are two steps back but I do truly love the base technology and I think GPS, tagging and community (hopefully open community) map and data building will change the world in subtle but profound ways in the future and keep any of us from every being lost anywhere but our own heads.
-Griffon
May 1st, 2008 at 2:27 pm
The skins I like (there are a lot of cool night one’s) are:
Topographic (nice use of colors though I would have gone green arrows instead of blue, but I get the desire for the blue yellow contrast). This is for day and is the nicest color pack I have found.
I also liked de_bestofcolors_v3 but the contrast wasn’t as nice as with topo’.
For night I use alt-night.
The AA_atlas is ok too.
A couple other things. The under the hood hardware is pretty good. The screen refresh and tracking, zoom pan etc are all really pretty fast. I like that.
The hands free has a huge flaw. there is no quick dial screen. So you either have to parse the address book or home they are on a recent call list. this is bad, and dangerous. Voice dialing again would have been a better choice, but not having this type of home or speed dial is pretty short sighted IMO.
Something other devices have had that I think is needed partculary with the small ass fonts is the ability to touch the street names, particularly the now on at the bottom of the screen and have the text to speech say the name.
A lot of other folks have asked to be able to touch the POI’s on the 3d screen, I also think that would be keen.