I bought one of these units and the internal battery is utterly useless. I have read that this is a known issue (along with slow operation). I expect TomTom would say it is not designed to be run off the internal battery (so why does it have one then?).
Could I open up the unit and fit a decent battery, cost-effectively?
They have probably fitted the largest capacity battery that would physically fit in the unit. On the other hand, many Chinese sellers seem to have some snake oil advanced battery technology that provides 4 to 10x the capacity of the batteries that TomTom and Smartphone manufacturers fit to their products :)
So you can do simple stuff like setup the navigation inside your house and move it to the car before setting off without it losing that in the process.
Unlikely. You can't with the older 710 which does have very decent battery in it, when the battery has got to the end of its life. It has pretty fancy shielding around the electronics to stop it interfering with the GPS reception and it isnt trivial to restore that.
Also dead handy if you're on hols and want to walk a route. My year old GO
250 promises 2 hours on the internal battery. It came with a mains charging cable with a micro USB plug.So you can do simple stuff like setup the navigation inside your house and move it to the car before setting off without it losing that in the process.
Unlikely. You can't with the older 710 which does have very decent battery in it, when the battery has got to the end of its life. It has pretty fancy shielding around the electronics to stop it interfering with the GPS reception and it isnt trivial to restore that.
I've become less and less impressed with TomTom beasts.
Their updated service is much slower than Garmin's and TomTom's are too temperamental.
We had a TomTom die for no obvious reason - won't turn on, reset etc. Replaced it with a Garmin- updates must be 20 x faster min.
Maybe its a case of not actually designed for the job it does. I have a shaver like this, it does not shave very well. Brian
I'm wondering that too. It was quite cheap.
If you examine the Youtube video about replacing the battery on a TT Start 52 it appears that the original battery is rated at 3.7V, 1100mAh
The "extended life" replacements at
also seem to be 3.7V 1100mAh (also available via Amazon UK)
I/We have had a TomTom for many years (720, and now a 510 - the Mrs likes them, or more like, can't be bothered to learn how to use something different).
Tom Tom, as a company, has been going nowhere for many years now
One cannot ignore the feeling that their market is disappearing fast.
Their hardware - both the old 720 and the new 510, is as dated as can be. The device, despite having a smaller screen and probably only 5-10% of the functionality of my phone, weighs at least twice as much. Weight may not seem like a serious issue, but as the device is attached to the windscreen with a suction holder, and rattles with every bump on the road, I really cannot see why they couldn't make it weigh a fraction of what it does.
The processors that they use are also very dated/slow - even just navigating the menus is slow.
The battery in all the SatNavs that I have come across over the years has never lasted more than a year or two before it would all but not hold charge at all. Not really sure why, but I can only assume that they expect you to use it when connected to an external power source, so don't invest much in making the battery last long.
All in all, a dated family of devices in terms of both software and hardware, and well overpriced for what they are. To their credit I must say that their windscreen holders are much better than any other that I have seen. I personally use a Chinese noname (£25) that runs Win CE with iGO - a fully customizable sat nav software that is light years better than TomTom's.
There are plenty of videos on YouTube showing how to replace the battery. Personally I wouldn't bother - it will also die sooner rather than later.
OTOH TomTom GO - the app fer yer mobile - is actually very good and is a subsrciption model,. I foresee them dumping hardware pretty mucg completely and becoming a service company.
Can't see that being viable given that the main competitors are free and offer much more than TomTom can do service wise.
The problem with mine is that it struggles to hold any charge from one day to the next, which means it cannot be set up until it is plugged into the vehicle. The previous TomTom could run for an hour without charging.
That is a classic sign of a damaged failing lithium battery
A possible bodge: run it off a power bank, hooked up by the USB cable?
No effort required...
Thomas Prufer
Thanks very much. It's only five months old, so maybe I should just take it back to the shop and tell them it's faulty.
Yes, you certainly should when it has lasted such a short time.
My TomTom is ~5 years old, and the battery allows me to use it for such interesting things as speed testing a boat on Lake Garda last week (over
60KPH - quite impressive really)Occasionally when I turn it on on the way across the car park at work it says it's flat - but I've put that down to it not going to sleep.
Andy
This bit of friendly spam arrived today from 7DayShop :-
Doesn't mention TomTom but could it work? Seems portable enough. My old TomTom uses mini usb and new one uses micro usb socket. I got one of those mini to micro converters on Ebay for about £2 delivered from China and works fine on all my stuff.
I have one of these, and it will definitely work with a TomTom (or anything else that is powered via a USB).
The slight downside that I found with it is that unlike several other similar capacity power banks that I have this one seems to take much longer to charge for some reason.
7dayshop's above Anker Powercore 10400 is 3A output, £16 inc shipping. This has been superseded by the 20100 output 4.8 amps model via scan.co.uk at £30
For charging my phone, I use a mains plug-in adapter. I assume this is faster than using the computer's USB port?
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