Apple iPhone 4 and TomTom- Got Velcro?
If you just got your iPhone 4 and are a little (or a lot) annoyed because your pricey TomTom Car Kit will not work with it, relief is just a step away and available from the fine folks that bring you Velcro.
If you are like me, one of the main reasons you purchased your iPhone was to have just one device to carry that did all the stuff you wanted done. That included being a telephone, acting like an iPod, and impersonating a GPS. All those apps were just a bonus for me, and still are. So I laid down my $199 for an iPhone 3G, put all my music on it, and went looking for a turn-by-turn GPS in advance of a number of road trips and a lengthy stay a long way from where I live. The phone worked fine, the music sounded really good, but the idea got way off course with the GPS part of the plan.
All the buzz around GPS for the iPhone centered on the TomTom software. It was really pricey at $99, but I was going to entrust my ability to move about the country at will to whatever I bought, so I decided that perhaps the best, in this case, was a good idea, even if it cost more. Thus begins the ugly saga of the TomTom and the iPhone. The 3G did not have much of a GPS chip installed, so reception was spotty most of the time. The TomTom GPS software was not quite useless with the 3G (too slow), but it was close. Then the TomTom car kit came out. I heaved a large sigh and plunked down another $100 for the car kit. I now had as much invested in the GPS function as I did in the phone and the music functions.
Worse, although I was able to receive those GPS satellites somewhat better with the car kit, I still spent a lot of time looking at a “poor GPS reception” error, and the phone was unable to keep up, so it was a long time after a turn when it decided what I should do next. It did not help that the TomTom app was too much for the 3G processor and everything happened S L O W L Y. To make it worse, the TomTom app could not figure out how to get me through St. Louis and hadn’t a clue how far it was between Indianapolis and Columbus.
So you can imagine my mood when I plugged my new iPhone 4, whose speed would save the day, into my TomTom Car Kit, only to discover that it would not even charge the phone, let alone process GPS for it. It looked for all the world like I had a corded brick from TomTom on my hands. TomTom and Apple are not saying much of anything, of course. If they did, they might have to admit that there was a problem, something which neither of the involved companies seem able to do. Fortunately, some enterprising soul found a possible solution, which consists of glueing a piece of Velcro to the car kit. You can take a look at how to do it in this Engadget video.
In a brief test, though, I found that the iPhone 4 does not need any help from the car kit, anyway. It does a masterful job of receiving GPS signal, it is fast, fast, fast, and the only problem seems to be that you have to hold it or lay it somewhere if you don’t use the car kit, which is less convenient. Other than that, the car kit may well be the modern equivalent of a buggy whip. All in all, the TomTom experience has been a very bad one, and the iPhone 4 experience continues to rock.
So, what are you guys using for GPS on the iPhone?
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