It was a great gift and one of the first things I did was to update its map.
After doing it I tried it out.
To my disappointment, it didn't had the street where I live. It just had part of the surrounding neighborhood, so it look like I was in the middle of nowhere, like doing off-road with my car...
TomTom says there's an average of 15% of roads and streets changing every year. The neighborhood where I live was finished in 2001, meaning it has already 8 years.
There were a couple, or so, new TomTom maps that came out but none had my street. Finally, the current version, 8.25, has my street but it comes with an error on its name...
8 years of delay and it came out with an error!...
Unbelievable...
I do know TomTom buys the maps, it does not make them themselves, they get them from Tele Atlas if I'm not mistaken, but I have nothing to do with it. I have a TomTom product, not a Tele Atlas, so it is TomTom who's responsible for the products they sell, even if it includes technology they get from others.
TomTom states it works hard to deliver the ultimate naviagtion experience. The problem is that TomTom fails in the basics: the maps.
And it's not the problem it took 8 years to include my street on its maps, its the fact that the maps need to be cleaned up and you need to know extra information about your destination before you're actually be able to search for your destination:
- The street names have errors and are totally unnormalized. For instance, if you're looking for an avenue, you don't know if it starts with "Avenue", "Av." or "Av". Needless to say that if you're looking for street ABC but it's registered in the system as ABB, you'll have trouble to find it. You have to look for all possible combinations and watch out for typos.
- It does not allow you to search for middle strings, you always have to search for the beginning of the string. If you're looking for X, and you don't know if it's an avenue, a street or a town square, you're unable to simply search for X, and you fail to find it.
- You must know extra information about your destination. For instance, if you need to find destination X on city A, you must provide the X zip code or the civil parish. Needless to say that in many countries, Portugal included, the zip codes have mistakes and people don't always know the name of the civil parish where X is located. If people knew this kind of information, probably they also knew X and would not require TomTom to guide them.
All this combined, I feel frustrated using my TomTom GPS because it does not have, or I'm unable to find, around 20% of my destinations... Talking about "the ultimate navigation experience": do it the hard way, see on a paper map, watch the stars, or stop and ask for directions...
I don't need a search engine running on my TomTom, though it would be extremely helpful, but name normalization and reducing all these search barriers would result on much better search results for the user.
./M6
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