Warranties, app stores and me

Friday, January 6th, 2012

My late uncle and I were very different people. Despite being the two ‘fixers’ in the family, the ones who got the busted kettles and the snapped gear cables from the rest of the clan, we were poles apart in one area: our approach to warranties. Even though he would keep his cars going for 20 years, he had a very sharp understanding of what should be his responsibility, and what was down to the vendor.

Actually, that’s an understatement. Woe betide the firm whose slipshod customer handling captured his attention. Once the horn-rimmed specs and the Brylcreemed bonce were aimed in their direction, he would pursue them relentlessly, his measured drawl torturing their receptionists until they actually did put him through to the MD or the Company Secretary (which incidentally is still quite a good one to try, since chancers seldom know enough about company law and structure to try that route).

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TomTom 940 and the tortuous road to recovery

Monday, September 20th, 2010

If you read my Epilog column in the new shiny edition of PC Pro, you will know that my respect for TomTom and its software upgrade process really couldn’t be much worse.

In short, the company released a major update for the TomTom 940 almost two months ago which simply didn’t work. It wouldn’t connect to the online TomTom Live services, which is the very reason for having this device. The Live services gives you features such as live traffic rerouting, Google access and so forth.

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Yoda on TomTom? It’s a road to disaster

Thursday, July 8th, 2010

I’ve always found novelty voices on satnavs about as funny as The News at Ten. Largely because I spent one of the most fraught hours of my life, lost on the outskirts of a French airport, thanks to the John Cleese voice my dad had thoughtfully downloaded onto his TomTom.

I could tell something was wrong when my dad started grinning from ear-to-ear the moment he switched the sodding thing on, before we pulled out of the car park. Five minutes later, something was definitely wrong, when for the third time in as many minutes, we had to cut across three lanes of traffic to make the required turn, only to get even more lost than we were in the first place.

The reason? Mr Cleese’s hilarious directions threw in the suffix “beaver right”, every time he issued the genuine direction “bear left”. Bear, beaver, get it? Yes, it had me in fits of laughter for, ooh, nano-seconds. The problem was, with the traffic noise and iffy speaker I couldn’t really hear what Basil Fawlty was saying, and thus bellowed at my dad to hang a sharp right every time he took a left. There’s a place for weak puns, and that place is The Daily Express - they have no place on satnav commentaries.

So it was with a weary sigh that I discovered TomTom is adding Yoda’s voice to its line-up of novelty accident causers this afternoon. Then I watched the spoofed “making of” video on YouTube, and I have to admit, it made me laugh…

How to install free country maps on your Nokia phone

Friday, June 18th, 2010

The current issue of PC Pro includes a road test of satnav devices – from a standalone device produced by TomTom to the freebies that come with new Nokia phones and Android mobiles. (If you’re based in the UK, you’ll be able to buy the issue until Wednesday 14 July.)

However, during our research for that feature we endured almost an hour of hitting brick walls when attempting to download maps directly to a Nokia phone. And that’s a real shame, as Nokia has one of the more interesting pieces of satnav software, and it generously provides free maps for every country we can think of.

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Apple iPad: the world’s biggest satnav

Thursday, May 13th, 2010

I had lunch with satnav software makers CoPilot the other day – and no, it wasn’t in a roadside café. One of the more surprising revelations was that the company had just begun offering an iPad version of its software in the US; the most surprising revelation was that it was selling like hot cakes.

Using the 9.7in iPad screen as a satnav struck me as potentially reckless. With that A4-sized device mounted on your windscreen, you’re going to be blocking out a sizeable chunk of your field of vision. It’s more than double the size of TomTom’s biggest device, the Go 950.

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Life Imitates Art

Monday, January 19th, 2009

Passing through Heathrow T5 just after Xmas on my way to Bavaria for a meeting or two, I grabbed Charles Stross’ “The Jennifer Morgue” to read on the plane – and doubtless, in some airports too, since ground temperatures dropped to -20 practically while I was in the air.

Stross is definitely Our Kind Of Author, though I find he has that breathless Linux-Nerd way about his writing which immediately puts my teeth on edge (but doesn’t stop me reading). He clearly has some technology scars about his person and has done at least one book (Halting State) which suggests a high degree of familiarity with the online world and software development.

Anyway, at one point in “the Jennifer Morgue”, Stross stymies his heroes by having their transport crash – in software, not by running into something solid. As he no doubt intends, I had a nerdy chuckle at that while the Airbus 319 speared through the crystal-clear air across a Europe whiter then even the dreams of the BNP could make it.

Then I got in my hire car.

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Maps?! Where we’re going, we don’t need maps!

Thursday, May 29th, 2008

Growing up I always used to love family trips. A bit of sun, sand and ice cream; a nice sing-song; maybe a rollercoaster or two. An uncomfortable dip in the freezing, polluted sea; a nasty bout of the runs in a caravan chemical toilet; the chance to relentlessly bully my little sister and get relentlessly bullied by my big brother.

But there was one thing that really entertained us without fail: the obligatory map-reading fiasco. Some of the finest arguments I’ve ever witnessed occurred in the front of our car, usually to a bizarrely ill-fitting soundtrack of Paul Simon’s Still Crazy After All These Years (thanks for that, Dad). So it’s with great sadness that I realise I’ll never repeat the great shows put on by my parents.

You see, over the last few days I’ve driven nearly 1,400 miles around the UK on a bit of a mountain climbing quest, and the journeys were, it has to be said, uneventful. And it’s all the fault of my car’s newest shiny gadget, its very own 1.21-Jigawatt flux capacitor, if you will. Also known as TomTom.

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