Missing Feature "TomTom Services" on 2405/2505??

While on TomTom's page for compatible phones that connect to TomTom units via Bluetooth, I noticed my phone (Blackberry Storm 2) has the capability to give TomTom Services to older models like the Go 730 and 920. Are these the services like Live traffic, Google Search, weather and Quickfix GPS? And if so, how come the GO 2405/2505 isn't able to receive these same services with my phone?

Adding such a feature to the GO 2405/2505 would give TomTom a major edge over the competition IMO. Why pay a monthly subscription on "Live" models when my cell phone can provide the same connection to these services for free (if that is the case here). Isn?t the $10 a month subscription on ?Live? models just to pay for the GSM cell connection anyways??

No, you cannot get the TomTom's actual "LIVE"services via a mobile phone. It has to use the internal SIM card and modem.

There was a way to get a "Traffic" service via a connected mobile, but it was nowhere near as good as HDTraffic from the LIVE services and it looks like you still have things like "buddies" in the US, which have been dropped in Europe.

To my understanding, the internal SIM and modem on "Live" models is just a GSM cellular data connection, no different from any other GSM phone. Yes my Storm 2 uses CDMA when in the United States but I doubt that matters. All it sounds like is that the "Live" models just need some sort of way to connect to TomTom Services to function regardless of what kind of connection it is. The only real reason I can see why TomTom went with GSM on "Live" models is that it is universal throughout most of the world.

Okay I can understand that HD Traffic would not be possible through a cell phone but an additional layer of regular traffic info for regular roads would be nice . My real question though is how come older and lest feature packed TomTom models can have this functionality with my phone and the new GO models can't? Is it possible it'll come later in an application update for these models??

My understanding is that older models used the cell phone 'tethered' to obtain what was then known as Plus Sevices.

And telecos no longer have 'tethered' plans. Or something like that.

The old PLUS system is one of the best Tomtom ideas ever made. It was Tomtom's primary live content delivery method from 2006-2008. PLUS relayed information through your own cell phone, and provided pretty much everything their current LIVE service does today.

Around 2008, the cellphone industry was beginning to fear becoming dumb pipes, and started banning features like tethering, or at least making the process very complicated.

In 2009, Tomtom switched to LIVE service, where they built their own modem into the Tomtoms. They say it was for "ease of use", but I wouldn't be surprised if Vodafone made non-tethering a requirement in exchange for providing HD traffic data.

It was an unfortunate shift. Tomtom's HD traffic is phenomenal, but the modem-based transmission service has been nothing but trouble (bugs, outages, crashes) ever since it was launched. It's really hard to make a good cellular modem, and Tomtom obviously doesn't have the knack in that area. So far, the only reliable HD traffic system is the one on the iPhone Tomtom app (eg: someone else made the modem).

I'm with you, I'd much rather prefer a PLUS-style data transport: let the cellcos do what they do best.

True enough. I think the Blackberry folks were some of the last that had the option of purchasing a tethering plan for their units. As for complicated - well, it was that from the start unless your carrier and phone could be found in the rather limited list that TomTom provided. We certainly had fun getting folks up and running with various "dialing strings", etc., didn't we? TomTom seemed unprepared to do the research necessary to really expand their carrier and phone lists here in the U.S. They did a far better job in Europe. Meanwhile, all of the fun and games we were having here were being felt exponentially by TomTom tech support in the U.S. There may have been more than Vodaphone to blame for the move to a captured service that they could control (however poorly) from front to back.

One wonders how many $ (or Euros) TomTom spent on tech support calls for this one feature. Even those carriers and phones that were on the "list" could be problematic, as we saw here for a couple of years. I can't blame them for trying to set up a system they could control without all of the wildcards of trying to set up for a couple of dozen other carriers and who knows how many different phones. I wonder how many calls they got from people who didn't even know they needed a tethered Bluetooth DUN account to even make it work?

I dunno. It's been my impression pretty much from the start that most of the problems are happening on the back end in a server room somewhere. My service here in the Denver area has never failed to produce a connection (even when the forum here seems to indicate the rest of the country is dark), and I've never had any of the odd 1XXX errors that others have seen. Then again, I refused to update my firmware on my 740 beyond 9.054. Perhaps that helps?

While I was even able to get my old Nextel phones coupled up with TomTom's servers for Plus services, I can't agree that it was a better system. If TomTom had devoted the resources necessary to keep their lists of carriers and phones up to date with current equipment, it would have been another story. As it was, we spent a LOT of time here helping people sort out the connections, and you can bet TomTom did, too. I certainly wouldn't mind relegating my connection to Sprint, but then again, I was hooking up to Nextel - something that wasn't even supposed to be possible. That kind of hunt and peck is a lot to ask of most users.

I've yet to see a GPS manufacturer make a properly functioning live unit. Both Garmin's NuLink 1695 and TomTom's XL 340TM LIVE units get stuck waiting for SIM. That's the message Garmin's 1695 gives in the diagnostics screen. The previously mentioned TomTom puts a yellow exclamation mark in the traffic bar. On the one I used to have when I attempted to access any of the live services I got a similar message to Garmin's stating the SIM card had malfunctioned even though it hadn't. I could still connect to TomTom's live services part of the time and once I had a connection I stayed connected until I powered the TomTom off.

I haven't had any SIM issues at all with my 1695. Much faster and more reliable connection than my old TT740. One of the other mods here had a chance to use it for a bit, and I think he noticed the same thing, even tho both use the AT&T network.

Yes, the 1695 was very stable. I run my GO740 on app 8.312, so it's just as stable as the 1695.

But any newer GO740 apps crash all the time.

According to the Europeans, the GO LIVE 1000/1005 is just as crash-prone.

9.054 still rock solid here on my GO740. NO SIM or Live related errors. I'm still ignoring the update to 9.058.