TomTom and other car navigation systems are indeed useless as soon as you leave the roads. When you try to leave the road you'll notice that the navigation software will try to put you on the nearest road (which is kind of funny when you're driving on a temporary bypass due to road work and TT happily shows you driving along the "normal" road 50 meters away.. ).

But this goes both ways - the vector maps that makes them useless for outback navigation also makes it possible to do offline routing and re-routing, to know about speed limits, one-way roads, bike-only roads etc.

Then again, no software is better than the maps.. and TomTom get their maps from TeleAtlas (as do many other navigation systems), which again buy from different map makers in different countries, which again usually buys maps from local authorities. And if these last ones aren't putting in the latest or correct or complete information then there's not much TT can do at their end (but read below). For example, where I live the maps have _no_ information about one-way, non-motorized etc. That's why I so much appreciate TT's _excellent_ route recalculation function.

In their later versions TomTom has actually done something to help about this common problem.. there's now a 'layer' function which means that you can install 'patches' to their maps (on your own device), and even share these patches with others.

But as soon as you get off the road, or even just walk by foot in a city, an application like Maemo Mapper is much better. And sometimes it's much better for road navigation too because in some areas it helps a lot to be able to switch between numerous different map sources (satellite pictures, openstreetmaps, ve maps etc.)