Pocket PC Thoughts: Better Than DougDoug? TomTom Navigator 6 Reviewed

Installation


Figure 1: TomTom Home… it all starts here. Click on the graphic for a zoomed view.

Installation went pretty well, despite some minor issues. The first thing to install is the TomTom Home application on your PC. After this installation, you connect your Pocket PC via ActiveSync. You can then have the application detect a "TomTom device". My Loox N560 is specifically listed as compatible with TTN6, so there was no problem detecting it. The Home app also treats memory cards connected via a card reader as devices, which turns out to be a good thing, as I’ll explain shortly.

After finding a device, the Home app searches it for content from the TomTom application. If you click on the TomTom CD tab (it’s actually a DVD, but let’s not quibble over details), the contents of the CD are displayed. This includes applications, maps and voices, among other things. Naturally, the obvious choice for the first thing to install is the TomTom application for Pocket PC. Because of the size of the application and maps, the install routine defaults to a memory card when a Pocket PC is connected. I started the installation and it got to 6% and then errored out when trying to write a file. I tried a few things (mostly, checking if the card had enough room, and it did) and still got the error. So I finally pulled out my card reader and formatted the card.

The Home app seamlessly detected the card and displayed it in place of my Pocket PC. I started the installation over again and it got past the error. Just then I realized that I hadn’t put the card back in the Pocket PC, so I had my doubts about the success of installing a Pocket PC application directly to a memory card through a reader, rather than one inserted in the Pocket PC itself. I let the installation complete, including the full US and Canada map set, and then inserted the card into my Loox to check on the success of the install. I was pleasantly surprised to find that the install routine had put an auto-running setup routine for the Pocket PC on the memory card. So I just let the setup complete and I was almost ready to go.

Pocket PC Setup
When you first start the TomTom application (which I'll call TTN6 from this point forward) on the Pocket PC, you have to go through an activation procedure. A product code is included in the box, and the application generates a device code for your Pocket PC. You then must go to a TomTom site and enter the product code and device code. An activation code is returned, which you must enter into your Pocket PC to get the software to run. The setup routine then takes you through a wizard that guides you through some basic choices.

It was then that I ran into another issue. When you first start the product installation, you must specify your preferred locale/language for the Home app. So I was a bit perplexed to find that the setup routine didn’t install any voice file sets. You’d think that it would install the voice files for the selected locale/language of the Home app. So I thought I’d try installing the voice files directly to the Pocket PC. It errored out again when trying to write a file. So I went back to the card reader and the install was successful. But it seems that you really need a card reader to install this application successfully. Card readers are cheap and file transfer is very fast (which is a big plus when installing around 1 GB of map files), so that’s not a big issue. But some owners could be dead in the water if they didn’t think to try installing directly to the card. I saw no references to these errors in the TomTom Knowledgebase, so a tech support contact would be necessary for anyone who didn’t stumble into the solution like I did.

The final wrinkle was with setting up the GPS receiver. My Loox N560 has a GPS receiver built in. My current nav software, On Course Navigator 5 (OCN5), has a routine that auto-detects the GPS by cycling through baud rates and com ports. TomTom has nothing like this, so I had to manually set the values. For a program with its level of sophistication, this is a puzzling omission.