OT: Sat nav

Almost definitely

My tom tom *is* all that.

I run Tomn Tom Go MOBILE. The point being if you have ALREADY had to fork out the best part of £200 for a pos smartphone at least the tom tom app is only another £15 a year etc.

Not £150 or whatever a tom tom costs.

I have several Logitech keyboards and trackballs, and live a pretty much Windows-free existence - I don't recall ever having difficulty moving devices around between machines. I run Solaar, so I guess that handles it when required.

An afterthought: does this mean the whole of Google maps is saved into the phone's memory or is this downloaded copy obtained on demand, which would suggest that if the phone is out of range at the planning stage it could run into difficulty?

If you don't prepare in advance, the phone will need a data connection to downloads maps on demand, after a little while the phone has the intelligence to work out your "home area" and will download a small rectangle of data that encloses it and keep that on the phone (for 12 months?)

But you can draw your own rectangle on the map and download that data, e.g I have a single chunk of map data that covers roughly blackpool->hornsea->dungeness->exmouth

The offline area is limited to about 1GB, but you can have multiple areas, and you can set them to auto-update when you have wifi rather than 4G signal.

I made the mistake of updating the maps on my Tom Tom. It now no longer accepts full UK post codes.

I've had two tom toms, the first one out and a TomTom Start25 bought because the the map update for the first one was dearer than a new device plus lifetime maps. Both have been very good. Latest car VAG, has garmin based built in satnav and it is very awkward to use - poor MMI software to the extent, I still have my screen mounted tomtom fitted. I don't know about stand alone garmins but the VAG does not allow uploads of POI files that I have both collected and built from scratch over the years. TOM TOM everytime for me

A perfect reason why car manufacturers should stick to metal and leave ICE up to the consumer to BYOD. If they really want to try (bless) just a decent screen and a good solid wireless connection so you can BT your phone/tablet in ....

Is it definitely set to the UK? I seem to remember at one stage having to say what country I was in. If it defaults (eg) to the Netherlands, no wonder it won't accept UK postcodes.

Until I purchased a new (to me) car with inbuilt SatNav I too used TT Go on the smartphone and was pleased with the way it worked.

It was however power hungry. Before a 5 hour journey I had to make sure that the phone was first fully charged and during the journey that the phone was still being charged. The TT took more power than than provided by charging and at the end of 5 hours of constant use the phone battery was down to around 10% capacity.

No.

Yes.

Works fine.

TT on the smart phone can have the whole of the UK map in the phones memory and doesn't require any phone signal to operate as a Sat Nav. A decent smart phone has a inbuilt GPS receiver.

It will however require a phone signal to get live traffic updates - but if you don't get them you still have the SatNav facility.

TT on a smart phone requires you to communicate with home every within

I think it took about an hour the first time I did it (on an old Win7 laptop with dodgy keyboard and screen connector!). Last time I got the garage to do it when it went in for a service, but this year I forgot to ask them to do it. I could boot the old Win7 laptop and do it, but I don't really care enough to bother. I did download the latest garminexpress.exe file out of interest, and saw it came in at 86.4Mb!!! Insane size, as you still need to connect to Garmin to download the updated database (I think it was about 1Gb when I did it). Why do Garmin need an 86.4Mb file to update a satnav?

I haven't read the whole thread so might be repeating what others have said....

I can't find much fault with Google Maps. Other than them knowing my every move.

And sometimes they'll send you on a poverty tour through a slum if it's

How would I use my Andriod phone to navigate without an internet signal? I have never done more than speak to the phone or type in a post code. I thought these needed to access Google to start the journey.

My old 3790T will do that! Which town is it in and I will show you.

I use Waze which has volatile maps though will retain maps associated with the chosen route. You need to be connected to the internet to start the journey.

Google maps/drive allows you to download maps, therefore you shouldn't need any access to the internet to start the journey.

I used to have a Nokia phone, and that allowed you to download a series of maps of much of the world. If you didn't want traffic info it worked very well as a stand-alone satnav. If I was travelling through Europe I would turn data off to save pennies.

Sorry, 'under the device' where Andy (I have Ubuntu something on the machine in question).

Cheers, T i m

Quite [1], but have you ever connected two devices (kbd / mouse) through one USB interface under Linux?

See above.

Cheers. T i m