Comments on: Palm GPS Navigator Smartphone Edition Review

No, you do not have to switch to a specific map set AFAIK. Of course, I was only able to get 30 miles across the nearest state border but still...from what I've gathered from Palm & TomTom you can have contiguous state to state mapping.

Again, I just used the preloaded MMC for the purposes of the review and it had the entire USA contained on it so I never experimented with the loading of maps for anything more than for curiosity purposes (having a single DVD is sooo much nicer than a pile of 9 CDs of various regions).

If/when I end up buying a 4gb SD card I figure I'll load the whole country on the card and still have ~3gb left over for other stuff. Then I'll keep the preloaded TomTom card in my travel bag as a spare or as a backup.

Pilot 1000-->Pilot 5000-->PalmPilot Pro-->IIIe-->Vx-->m505-->T|T-->T|T2-->T|C-->T|T3-->T|T5-->TX-->Treo 700P

Good luck.

;-)

If time & circumstances permit, I'd actually like to try the new TT6 card and see if it works on non-Treo Palms (TX, LD, T5 especially) as well as (highly unlikely I'll be able to test this) non-Palm WinMob devices.

i'd imagine that aside from the 240*240 screen resolution of the 700W vs. the 650/700P's 320*320 there are very few differences. TomTom's UI & code runs nearly seamlessly between both OSes.

Pilot 1000-->Pilot 5000-->PalmPilot Pro-->IIIe-->Vx-->m505-->T|T-->T|T2-->T|C-->T|T3-->T|T5-->TX-->Treo 700P

I WILL try the kit out on my TX this weekend.

Pilot 1000-->Pilot 5000-->PalmPilot Pro-->IIIe-->Vx-->m505-->T|T-->T|T2-->T|C-->T|T3-->T|T5-->TX-->Treo 700P

On another note, when are TomTom going to stop forcing me to pirate their Australian map and actually offer it for sale? My only current option besides buying one of the stand-alone GO units is to download a hacked map from the net. And while it's proven reliable so far it's starting to get a little out of date and appears to be based on the 2004 UBD.

Pull your finger out, TomTom.

Tim
I apologise for any and all emoticons that appear in my posts. You may shoot them on sight.
Treo 270 ---> Treo 650

Ugh. MEAN. You'll see what I MEAN.

How's the edit function coming, Ryan? ;)

Tim
I apologise for any and all emoticons that appear in my posts. You may shoot them on sight.
Treo 270 ---> Treo 650

I seriously doubt that anything TomTom does will have any effect on piracy. If there's one truism in the software world, it's that copy protection is easily bypassed by people who want to. The only ones that it actually inconveniences are the legitimate users.

Surur

They said I only argued for the sake of arguing, but after an hour I convinced them they were wrong...
Hey!! I made associate writer at PDA247. Come see my nattering over there!!
www.clieuk.co.uk/wm.shtml

The receiver is so small & lighweight with such good battery life that it wouldn't be a problem to take it from car to car or to your pocket for hiking.

I have no experience whatsoever with Mac GPS software, btw.

Pilot 1000-->Pilot 5000-->PalmPilot Pro-->IIIe-->Vx-->m505-->T|T-->T|T2-->T|C-->T|T3-->T|T5-->TX-->Treo 700P

http://tinyurl.com/23o2d6

I think the primary things greyed out are the more elaborate POI searches and where you can input a destination by its latitude & lontitude coordinates. TT6 doesn't appear to be as crippled as I was initially worried it would be. The startup "lawyer" screen actually irritates me more than anything and it's the same as TT5.

Pilot 1000-->Pilot 5000-->PalmPilot Pro-->IIIe-->Vx-->m505-->T|T-->T|T2-->T|C-->T|T3-->T|T5-->TX-->Treo 700P

Cheers

Alan

- tx

What about T5? Will TTN 6 run on it?

tomekM

Remember, in the T5's favor are a 104mhz faster CPU and slightly larger DBheap/DBcache sizes (though TT6 still runs out of it on occasion) vs. the TX. The TX does have a newer OS and some NVFS optimizations that the T5 doesn't have so I'd imagine that TT6 would ultimately run about the same on both units...or it might be slightly faster on the T5 but a tad more stable on the TX.

Pilot 1000-->Pilot 5000-->PalmPilot Pro-->IIIe-->Vx-->m505-->T|T-->T|T2-->T|C-->T|T3-->T|T5-->TX-->Treo 700P

Since it appears you have access to the new Navigator bundle package for the 700P and tried it on the TX, can you take it a step further and advise if the Palm® GPS Navigator Smartphone Edition 2 Navigator from Palm would be a good route to go for the TX. ie: (1) will the pre-loaded SD card for the 700P work directly with the TX and (2) will the GPS/Device charging cable work with the TX and (3) will the TX fit in the provided mount? Love the TX for the screen real estate and looking for the best Navigator solution. Would you go this route or is there a better package? If this will work, it would also provide folks an option to move to the TREO later.

Again, appreciate you sharing your knowledge and experience!!

2. Yes, the combo charging cable works fine on the TX and the 700p. I've used both with the supplied cord. It's just a standard Palm Athena/MultiConnector cable so it'll work on nearly all recent Palm products, even the Windows Mobile ones.

3. Yes the TX will fit in the provided mount. It's adjustable and appears to be the same style used on the older Palm Navigator GPS kit (that was compatible with the TX, T5, LD etc). No problems there! It's also made in Germany so it's got excellent build quality and strong plastics.

Thanks for the kind words. Glad to be able to be of assistance. I wouldn't even rule out improved TX compatibility in a future software update to TomTom Navigator 6 (that is, assuming TomTom ever releases an update!)

Pilot 1000-->Pilot 5000-->PalmPilot Pro-->IIIe-->Vx-->m505-->T|T-->T|T2-->T|C-->T|T3-->T|T5-->TX-->Treo 700P

Yes, I can confirm that Navigator 5 ran just fine on my Tx with the TomTom Bluetooth GPS receiver. The only reason that I changed to Nav 6 was that I was tempted into upgrading from the GB to the Western Europe Map. With only the GB map it ran error free for well over 6 months and some 15,000 miles of driving around UK.

Incidently as a follow up to my previous note: I did try copying Nav 6 plus Map onto a 2GB SD card and re-entering the favourites but it still baulked at 10. So it isn't just a card capacity issue. It is just so frustrating having to keep a note of all those locations that I used to have stored as favourites.

If anyone has any clues I'm always willing to try potential fixes.

Colin

1) If you've used TCPMP and other apps with memory leaks: soft reset before anything else. Reason: Device is more stable for long routes.
2) (In the meantime:) Turn on the GPS and let it get a fix before starting TT. Reason: TT sometimes freezes / times out otherwise (Bluetooth stack overflow?).
3) If on a very long route (>1000 km or very many turns): Avoid doing anything else while navigating, e.g. no background-PocketTunes. Reason: obvious.
4) Always exit TT correctly via the "End"-screenbutton. Reason: clears cache correctly.
5) As a precaution: Use the smallest possible map (I noticed no difference between on-card or in-memory).

Result: never once (!) had a problem for years - since then. I can conveniently switch off the T5 / TX when on a long stretch of straight highway (leave the GPS on) and simply switch the device on again after an hour - it picks everything up again after 5..10 sec.

Correction: have to use bigger maps (> 200MB) sometimes, got frozen out once when a long way (? 500 km) from "home" (as defined in TT) as well as from my destination (as defined in current TT route). And could not recover with steps 1 to 3. Finally did a new route "from here" to a destination on my way, but much nearer. Worked. After some time did a recalculation to my true destination. Worked.

Advice: Always keep a phone number and/or a cheap map with you. In the years I've used TT I recognize that it has a 99.9(9?)% accuracy but will lead you completely astray the rest of the time. Don't completely rely on it.

Palm Pilot -> ... -> TX -> Palm TX-Phone, I hope

I was interesting in your hints and the fact that you were also using a TX with TT5 and now TT6. Do you have the same issue that I have - the reduction in the number of favourites that can be stored?

I did wonder if it was due to the size of the Western Europe map - with TT6 it just about fits on a 1GB SD card, but that cannot be the issue as I transferred it all to a 2GB card and the fault persists.

I tend to keep things simple and don't use the Palm for anythingthing else but TT when I am travelling and have never had it crash or even stutter.

Regards,

Colin

I believe 6.01 is the newest current version and that 6.03 is coming to add support for the new Treos (680, 700wx, 750). Let's hope that someone amidst those "optimizations" that unofficial TX support might be included as well!

Pilot 1000-->Pilot 5000-->PalmPilot Pro-->IIIe-->Vx-->m505-->T|T-->T|T2-->T|C-->T|T3-->T|T5-->TX-->Treo 700P

I'm looking forward to the next upgrade in the hope that it will cure the limited number of favourites that I now have on my Tx. Apart from that I must admit that with the Western Europe map the system works very well.

Colin

I also used it while on vacation in Washington, D.C. recently in both subway and walking routes. Not surprisingly, the satellite signals were lost when the train went sub-surface, but they were re-acquired very quickly upon emerging aboveground, even miles away.

(It was amusing to run the setup in the jet on the way to DC from a few miles up, with a DC destination set--it recalculated the roads below me to follow to that destination about as fast as it could raw the next route. Watching it in 3D mode was fun, but 2D mode zoomed way out (with no dest set) was quite useful as a ground-tracking display, although it seemed to lag behind the jet for a few miles.)

I found the package was very helpful in DC's sweltering June heat and humidity in selecting shortest-walking routes from museum to museum to restaurant to hotel!

There were two small problems on this trip: every once in a while, I would hear a triple "ding-dong" set of alert tones from the 700p, and I have been unable to figure out what that indicated. I suspect it may have been a notice of transition between Verizon's "in-zone" and extended network regions as I passed through "urban canyons", so I think this was a 700p/Verizon issue and not a GPS one.

The other minor problem was related to the same urban canyon condition: after standing at a street corner and inputting a new destination, the GPS sometimes couldn't get a direction-of-travel lock for 50 feet or so, and Murphy insisted that I would have to try two or three of the four directions before I was sure I was on the right track. ;-)

I'd really like a feature that my standalone GPS (Geko 201) has--a recorded track of my travels that I could download to my computer for overlaying (for instance) on a Google Earth map.

I found battery life of the GPS unit and of the 700p to be sufficient for five or more hours of navigation, which is plenty for me. Then I charged each via UPS from my laptop at the hotel. Worked nicely. The 700p display map, when set to its brightest, was perfectly readable in broad daylight.

I was able, for the most part, to keep the GPS unit in my front pants pocket with the antenna side facing out. On startup, I would hold it in my hand until I got BT- and sat-lock. I carry a camera bag while traveling, though, and it might be useful to attach the GPS to the top of the shoulder strap for the best signal.

Overall, I'd give this a 4.5 out of 5 rating.

Ted