Hi, I am looking to purchase either a Tomtom 510 or a road angel navigator 6000, i have a road angel camera alert system at the moment, and many of my friends have a Tomtom 510 and are very pleased with it, i dont know which one to go for, the tomtom is slightly more expensive, but it does more, like mp3 etc etc...
Im not particularly bothered about looks, or what gadgets (MP3 etc) it has, i need a good camera warning and a good satellite navigation system. any advice from the tomtom experts out there. thanks
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I have an older Tomtom, the 500 and it works extremely well. The downloads can be expensive from Tomtom for the cameras..............a mate gets them from somewhere else and e-mails them to me and we split the cost.
I found the downloading bit too confusing and wifey has to do it...........but i am a complete plank on a computer. Spoke to someone only yesterday on the subject and he's given up trying to achieve it. So make sure you know what you're doing or someone else can show you (in reality Mrs W isn't an expert, but has considerably more patience).
Well worth it though. Choosing how far up the road you get the warning is useful. If you do it far enough ahead you can work out on the map where the camera vans are likely to be (albeit more often than not there's nothing there). The sites are on there because every camera van site has to be risk assessed and for accident hotspot stats they are all published.
One irritating feature is the proximity warning and by that i mean it will go off if you pass a side road with a camera in it. You can turn this off so that only your carriageway is going to have a warning, but this does not allow the opposite carriageway to work (i.e the lane going the other way) so would not pick up a camera on the other side of the road that affects your carriageway.....(hope this is clear enough)
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pocketgps.co.uk has camera downloads. It's £2 per month or less if you pay annually. Available for lots of GPS systems so worth a look.
If you do what I did recently, and are first to submit a new camera which is later confirmed to be correct, you get life membership. I've got 20 years and 11 months left for downloads before I pay again. We probably won't have a lot of motoring things we do today when I'm 50+. And the website will have been long-gone.
Please note their free life membership in this instance is actually only 21 years.
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If you do what I did recently, and are first to submit a new camera which is later confirmed to be correct, you get life membership. I've got 20 years and 11 months left for downloads before I pay again.
knowing my mate (and his short arms and long pockets), he's probably already done that and still charging me my half
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I recently bought a 510 for my wife as a birthday present, she loves it, It works really well and has the functions that we want (like you not bothered about ipod compatability), the wide screen is a great improvement over the last generation tomtoms. I got ours (sorry hers) for £300 from comet, I could have saved about £20 if i shopped around but I wanted the peace of mind of a large retailer to return it to if it breaks, some online companies can be a pain for this sort of after sales service.
Jonathan
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I am considering buying a TomTom GO 510 for my next car. My only worry (as with all portable sat navs) is that the windscreen fixation device screams "I'm an expensive Sat Nav get me out of here" to any passing car thieves. My Road Angel fixes to the windscreen but it is very easy to unplop the suction caps and they don't leave any tell tale signs after a quick wipe down. Can you remove the TomTom windscreen mount in a similar fashion?
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try this company.......www.brodit.com
they make fittings for all cars that clip onto the dashboard, usually the air vent. Not cheap, but the fitting which is left in the car (and your tomtom or whatever fits on to) looks like a universal fitting that could be used for just about anything, so doesn't give the satnav game away.
If you really wanted to you could pull the whole fitting out each time, but as it's pushed in to the tight space between the air vent and the dash i'd imagine after a while it would no longer be such a tight fit.
the one we've got is spot on..........another advantage is the satnav is at air vent level, not windscreen level, so you don't fall foul of legislation designed to keep your windscreen clear
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try this company.......www.brodit.com they make fittings for all cars that clip onto the dashboard, usually the air vent.
These air vent thingies worry me somewhat. Does their use necessitate the isolation of air flow from them whilst the Satnav is in place, as the thoughts of them being blasted with either hot or cold air may play havoc with their operation, or mess up battery life if not using the car's electrical system to keep them awake.
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Acer have just brought out a nice Satnav unit for about £186. This is their P610 model but the only drawback is that the std software does not support full 7 digit postal codes. At this price, however it gives the Tomtom a good run for its money.
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Acer have just brought out a nice Satnav unit for about£186. This is their P610 model but the only drawback is that the std software does not support full 7 digit postal codes. At this price, however it gives the Tomtom a good run for its money.
That's only £13 less than the sticker price on a new TomTom ONE mk2, which I saw yesterday in Currys or Comet or one of those places.
Having used my TomTom for about 6 months, I reckon that the lack of full post codes would make the unit a huge lot less useful. Narrowing in on a destination by map is tediously slow and inaccurate compared with using the postcodes, and I'd curse the Acer every day if I was stuck with one.
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Horses for courses on postcodes, I think.
We had a built in sat nav in the Lexus that didn't have any postcodes at all, and never found it a problem. Now I have a Sony portable unit that only has five digit postcodes - but again, never been a problem at all. I prefer the map entry even with the Sony.
It might be because we use it mostly for leisure, so are going to places like country walks, beaches, NT properties, none of which are easily findable by postcode anyway. If it IS an address, then both systems supported 123 Acacia Avenue or whatever anyway, without the postcode being needed.
In short, for us it's not vital. If you are visiting an industrial estate then it probably is.
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I got ours (sorry hers) for £300 from comet, I could have saved about £20 if i shopped around but I wanted the peace of mind of a large retailer to return it to if it breaks,
That's what you would hope, but I had to take comet to the small claims court to sort out problems with a purchase.
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Makro have all the tom tom range on special offer at the moment whether this is the cheapest around who knows.
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i don't want to teach people to suck eggs.........but.......... working on the principle i was clueless and found out by chance, so others might not know.
We bought the Tomtom from a well known retailer on the net.......... we had chsoen them at random and we checked a few others for price. The retailer had a deal going which was along the lines of 'spend more than £250 and we'll knock off 25%' .......and to get this deal (for anything not just satnav) you had to type a code in at the purchase bit of the procedure
so it's worth checking the home pages etc for deals as well as just the satnav type pages
maybe you all do this anyway and it's just me being slow......but it might be helpful for someone else who's slow
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I'd put a lot of emphasis on how the TomTom/Road Angel or whatever is mounted to the dash. Look for a mounting such as a sucker pad or magnetic clip that can be removed completely when you leave the car.
A universal mounting may not say "TomTom" but it does suggest there's something electronic and therefore potentially valuable. The thief who smashes your side window won't be bothered that he's done £100 worth of damage to your car on a bad hunch!
Or maybe I'm just paranoid since six cars were broken into on one day at work, and all appear to have been targeted because they had MP3 adaptors, phone chargers, satnav mounts, CD players etc visible inside the cabins...
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I'd put a lot of emphasis on how the TomTom/Road Angel or whatever is mounted to the dash. Look for a mounting such as a sucker pad or magnetic clip that can be removed completely when you leave the car. A universal mounting may not say "TomTom" but it does suggest there's something electronic and therefore potentially valuable. The thief who smashes your side window won't be bothered that he's done £100 worth of damage to your car on a bad hunch! Or maybe I'm just paranoid since six cars were broken into on one day at work, and all appear to have been targeted because they had MP3 adaptors, phone chargers, satnav mounts, CD players etc visible inside the cabins...
Well, I have to say that when people stop cluttering up the inside of their cars with a lot of unnecessary gizmos then the incidence of break-ins will decrease. Surely the manufacuters, of reasonably specced cars , have provided enough ICE thus making add-ons quite unnecessary. Most of us don't need additional garbage added to cars no matter how 'essential' we may think they are.
My car has a standard fit radio/CD player and to my mind that is sufficient for me. I love driving and keeping my car clean and efficient and don't need other distraction around me such as Satnav, iPod adapters etc. Keep the inside of your car for driving and not an extension of your home.
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