Me and my TomTom

Me and my TomTom

I hadn’t heard of TomTom until I moved to Germany in 2006.

We landed at Frankfurt, eyes sandy from sitting up all night in discomfort (wishing I could fall asleep and dream of flying first class), having loaded our exhausted kids and the bulging suitcases that contained our complete possessions for one year living in a village just outside of Dusseldorf.

As I drove the rental up the Autobahn with enough excitement to keep me safely awake, I realized that driving here was not going to be anything like driving back home.

The area we lived in has 30 million people, and the freeways, off-ramps, secondary roads, side roads, and every other kind of concretized twist and turn to keep those people all moving at once.

After two months of struggling to find anything every time we left the house, and after a road trip across the Chunnel to England and back – a land where only the M roads are straight – my wife and I realized we HAD to have a nav unit.
And everyone in this part of Germany used a TomTom.

I can say with certainty that getting a TomTom saved my life, because I would have gone insane and hurled myself from something if I had continued struggling to use my innate sense of direction.

I used our TomTom all through Western Europe, driving into the centre of Paris five times without fear, negotiating Rome, Florence and Naples, the Swiss Alps and Amsterdam, even listening to our beloved British female voice as she insisted that we continue along the literal goat path that took us from Gualdo Tadino to Assisi because it was road, damnit!

When we moved back, I packed that thing away like it was the Holy Grail, and, after buying the North American maps, have used it to drive all over Toronto, Boston, New York City, Las Vegas, Los Angeles and the high deserts, deep forests and tractless wastelands in, around, on the way to and between all of these places.

And so, when I learned that I would be reviewing the newest TomTom ONE n14644 and the TomTom iPhone app, I knew that I would be completely and utterly biased.

I think these are the best nav units for the average driver.

The display is large and bright, with a really easy and attractive interface, which is crucial for that quick glance whether you’re picking a path through the winding craziness of a medieval city packed with angry drivers or trying to find Serendipity on the upper East Side of Manhattan for a frozen hot chocolate. I always put my screen on Night display, which is cool and blue and easy to look at it.

The speaker in the back is good and loud, and the variety of voices is entertaining in and of itself. We tried out the Star Wars and Merry Melodies voice packs (these are sold separately) and they were fun, but I find myself coming back to Jane, my unflappable British co-pilot.

Having that voice call out where you are and when you need to turn is such a stress reliever, it’s hard to believe and going back to driving in a new area (especially a metropolitan area) is simple unacceptable without that.

TomTom has some really nice value ads as well, traffic monitoring and reporting to steer you away from trouble spots, and although this wasn’t working all that great in 2006 for whatever reason, it is much more effective now. I also really like the routing technology that allows the driver to make some decisions about routing based on a myriad of factors – your speed, rush hour, the number of traffic lights and so on. Roadside assistance through one catch-all phone number may also be a benefit for those who aren’t already members of CAA or whatever. Lane guidance is another great add-on in a big city, where the complexity of lane selection before an off-ramp is particularly complex and where a misstep can have truly annoying circumstances.

Nothing I’ve seen in the latest TomTom offerings have done anything but confirm what I have already known about this company’s great nav tools. If you’re a driver and you’re going off into the great unknown (at least to you), then you need one. Period.

Initial thoughts on the Nokia C6

The NaySayer here…

Nokia was kind enough to send one of their competitively priced (I’ve seen prices from $250 or so) smartphones over for us to check out, and I have a few first thoughts after a couple of days.

Look and Feel

It’s good for the hands, with a nice heft, which I like, for such a small phone. It feels substantial and dense somehow, which gives a sense of quality manufacturing. Realize that I’m in no position to assess that with any certainty, I’m just noting how it feels.

This phone is one of those with a slideout keyboard, and that too feels good. It comes out smoothly and solidly, and again, it feels weighted and strong, like the parts are well machined.

My daughter (14, and texting daily) immediately grabbed onto it and said she wanted it. She has a very cheap slideout phone, and without even turning the C6 on, figured she had to have it. Like me, she was responding to something about the way it works in your hand.

That kind of feel is important to me as a first interaction with a device. I need to be convinced right away that I shouldn’t have buyer’s remorse, something I get easily. The Nokia deals with that pretty well at first touch, with some kind of textured plastic on the back that gives it strength.

User Interface

Here’s where I started having some nags, and I’ll speak more to this in another post, after my blogging partner gets a chance to weigh in on it.

This phone has a touch screen, and you can use your finger or a stylus (Nokia recommends using their own specific stylus) to interact with it.

It gives you a satisfying haptic buzz when you activate an icon (and I really liked that), but I had a hard time getting a response right away, having to tap a couple of times to get things happening. Either I am clumsy and sausage-fingered, which would be odd for someone who uses a keyboard as much as I do, or I was simply not yet accustomed to the vagaries of this particular touchscreen. I’ve used other phones that have a much better response for me.

I also needed to spend a bit of time digging through the menus to find features. I decided I wouldn’t use the manual at all, preferring to run at it the way most users will – pawing away at it out of the box. I just started playing around. One specific note: Getting to the camera (5 megapixel) took more digging than I thought, although there may be a shortcut that I haven’t yet found, and the quality of the picture was good, but not great, particularly in low light. You won’t be replacing your DSLR with it, obviously.

I should point out that I handed the phone around to some of my students, however, and they were snapping pictures, adding contacts and whipping around in the UI without any complaints or questions, so I think my slowdowns with it are because I am used to a different paradigm of phone use, with a much simpler interface.

I asked the kids (Grade 11 Media class) what they thought, and like me, they focused on the feel, really liking it and wishing they could keep it. I think the C6 is a great transition up from the phones most kids get free with their initial texting plans.

I haven’t yet messed around with Ovi (the Nokia apps store), but I did watch some video from CNN, which streamed in quickly and without any snags, although it was in the wrong aspect ratio. (which will only bother a small segment of the population, according to my wife…)

So far, I like it as a phone very much, I struggle with the slide out keyboard even though most people really like it (again, it’s just not my usual phone typing style) and I find getting used to the interface taking me longer than I would have expected.

We’ll have a little more to say on the Nokia C6 soon.

Impressive Video on the Plug In Prius

The Hurt Locker

The Hurt Locker
dir: Kathryn Bigelow

When I watched Saving Private Ryan, I sat in the theatre behind three old men who watched in utter stillness. At the end, they turned to each other, wiping their eyes and one of them said, “Everything but the smell.” They were pale and drawn, with haunted expressions. They found the movie terrifying, more an archaeological expedition into searing memories, or a test of endurance than a piece of public entertainment.

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