Notices

Hey all, I've been a tablet user for about 4 months and I frequently experience what can only be described at GPS envy. That is to say, whenever I see a friend with a GPS device, I marvel at how they payed a fraction of what I payed for my n810 but get directions for free that don't require an internet connection. Gee, what a revolutionary idea, Wayfinder! The only thing the other guys charge extra for is traffic.

So my idea? Send a petition over to the folks at Wayfinder to create an update that allows free turn by turn navigation. I mean, virtually every tablet user visits ITT, so getting users to sign wouldn't be hard.

Any thoughts?

I get pretty good navigation directions from Maemo mapper. I don't think that "pretty much every tablet user visits ITT" -- statistics supposedly refute that. I don't think a petition is necessary or desirable.

Well, er, since the number of tablets sold is somewhere in the 500,000 to 1,000,000 range, and itT has about ~18,000 registered users, that really doesn't pan out at all

You get non-internet connecting routing if you register Wayfinder afaik. If your problem is that it's expensive to register, then that's a different matter.

You have one week free trial. After that you'll see that wayfinder is quite useless.
E.g., my free trial led me through a tortuos 30km route of very narrow mountain streets when I later discovered there was a straight route of about 5km, and that was after telling me it couldn't find a route for the previous 20km.
Couple that with unclear and sometimes late indications, the program quitting by itself some meters before telling me the correct motorway exit, outdated maps and you'll abandon your idea about a petition.

Ιndeed. Ι have a paid licence but it's so bad that I almost never use it. Even when it doesn't crash it's too slow to be usable while driving.

I don't think there's much hope for improvement on that front, unless the whole thing is rewritten from scratch as a native application (guess what the current one's written in, explains a lot doesn't it?)

I'd pay good money for a maemo port of TomTom though (and I already own a GO). Perhaps we should petition that instead?

Now I would sign that^ petition.

I'm thinkin' it would be relatively easy for TomTom to do...

That would probably be easy, yes. The GO also runs Linux on an ARM CPU. I think the major difference is that the GO is using just a framebuffer as display while the NIT uses an X-server. And I don't know if TT uses the ARM in big endian or little endian mode (that's easy to find out though). All in all, shouldn't be much trouble, presumably.

A month ago I visited my parents, who had purchased TomTom One. In that area (mostly forest and farmland...) in Finland the TomTom maps are full of errors so that the guiding instructions are completely wrong. In one area TomTom is asking to go to a "road" where there is no road at all!

The same road database errors exist in Google maps as well as Wayfinder maps. (So the Nokia Maps (Wayfinder) has no advantage there.)

Actually their purpose was to use GPS navigator when walking in forest (hunting, etc.). For that purpose the TomTom (or any other car navigation GPS...) is completely useless. I had my N810 with MaemoMapper and Finland topographic maps and they were very impressed. Next time I go there they asked to bring them one N810... even when I tried to told that the GPS is not exactly that good (fix time...), but regardless they still insisted to have one. Also my sisters husband who saw it said he wanted to buy my N810 on the spot! He asked if I could bring him as well one, but hasn't confirmed yet. (We asked the N810 price on local Nokia shop and they asked like 470Euros... So purchasing it locally there is out of question. )

As a summary, not even "professional" GPS navigator can overcome the restrictions of poor maps. Second, not everyone is needing a "hold hand and guide me" type detailed instructions when driving... just a map showing current position and roads nearby is adequate, at least for me. For that purpose MaemoMapper is perfect... and is suitable for "off the road" use like hunting, hiking, geocaching, etc.

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.)