As I talked about on Wednesday, I am generally pleased with the TomTom One XL. As with anything, it isn’t without it’s faults and shortcomings and I wanted to bring some of these to light.
- Unlike other TomTom devices that came out around the same time, you cannot use the One XL as a bluetooth speakerphone with your other phone. This bothers me a little less since it wasn’t something I was going for, and my phone has its own speakerphone capabilities, but it would have been nice for them to make this (seemingly simple) available on the device. Namely because the speaker in the device is of fairly good quality and I think it would have been a better speakerphone experience than the one built into the phone.
- The bluetooth connection can be a hassle. No one wants to work at getting the device to talk to your phone at the expense of being on their way, yet sometimes that seems to be what you have to do if you want to, say, get a traffic update before you head home from work in rush hour. Fortunately I’ve found a method that usually works, consisting of (after making sure bluetooth is enabled on your phone) disabling and re-enabling traffic. Also, make sure that if you are in a place where wifi is present, turn that off before trying to re-enable traffic. Also make sure you have a solid cell phone signal.
- There are several threads and posts out there referring to this, but occassionally my device has gone into a reboot mode. When trying to turn it off, it simply restarts. After a while of turning it off, eventually it might stay off. Other times I’ve had to plug it into the computer and run a disk check. There is even a flash clearining app available from the TomTom site, but that hasn’t seemed to be my issue. After this happened several times, I think I have figured out the cause and I haven’t had it happen since. The common denominator was automatic traffic updates versus me using my phone for a call. It seems that after trying so hard to get traffic updates (and I’m guessing my phone won’t dig for the data when I’m in a voice call) it flakes out and reboots. The way I’ve worked around this is to resort to manual updates when I am not using the phone. For most rides I only get the traffic update when I first start. The rides are short enough that not a lot is going to change in 20-30 minutes. For longer rides I might hit “update” when I am stopped at a light. This way I could get re-routed if the situation has changed dramatically since I began the commute.
- Traffic can be buggy. It seems that there are certain areas it will always try to route you around, even though it is probably the fastest way to get there. Sometimes, when you have time, you should verify those kinds of routes (when you think you know a faster way and it will never route you through). I tend to believe it when it sends me a certain way 3 or 4 out of 5 trips but routes me a different way the other time or two. That tells me that it is basing it on a significant traffic incident.
Here are four things that I have found in my short time with the device that I think are a little disappointing. I’m sure there will be more, as well as more reasons to love the device. One thing I do not love is the customer service from TomTom, and I will address that in my next post on this topic.
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Tags: Bluetooth, Flaws, TomTom One XL, traffic
