Of course, if TomTom is supplying XXL 540 units returned from Amazon as warranty replacements, that just compounds the problem. Knowing what we know of the Amazon stock from the Thanksgiving timeframe until now, it would simply be negligent for TomTom to resell from the Amazon stock without major retesting. That leads me to believe that the XXL 540 problem goes beyond the Amazon stock.
We can't know for certain what's happening with the returned units. Some were completely 'bricked' by user attempts to perform updates. Some units performed peculiarly right out of the box. Those, if returned, should have been sufficiently obvious as faulty that they would have had remedial action of some sort performed. Unusual faults can be missed during such incoming inspections, but what most users reported were problems that couldn't have been missed.
That leaves us with two possibilities regarding failing 540 units that were shipped by TomTom USA as replacements for the defective Amazon stock when users returned them. The first is that these units were flashed with the same sort of defective firmware that caused the users problems in the first place. We have no information that would cause us to believe that TomTom USA either did/didn't have access to the problem firmware that was being loaded at the factory. The second possibility is that TomTom USA did not fully deplete their stock of units with the aberrant firmware in their shipments to Amazon, and that surplus stock of problem units could have been shipped to the field as replacements.
Either way, it's a mess, but again -- we have NOT had any but the usual level of reports of 540's failing from sources
other than Amazon, and to a lesser degree, RMA replacements from TomTom. We get a very large cross section of channel sales here. If a significant number of bad units had been sold through another retail outlet, we'd have been hearing about it.
This problem very nearly mirrors one we saw two years ago with another TomTom unit and another retailer. It appears that TomTom will sometimes devote a specific period of 'line time' to fill major orders for a specific retailer. If something goes badly on the line during that production, you get these results.
There is a separate problem that is frequently being reported here that does impact a much wider population of 540s, but it's actually a Home problem -- that of Home not believing that it has an emulator ("Operate my XL") suitable for the firmware on many of the 540 units. That, sadly, is a not uncommon disconnect between the development efforts of the firmware guys and the application guys back in Amsterdam -- something we've seen a fair bit of over the last couple of years. I've had a fair bit of experience in this very area myself, and could not possibly overemphasize the importance of a close working relationship between firmware, 'driver', and ancillary application groups, and the need to test, test, test. TomTom has dropped the ball in their coordination of those groups any number of times (one could point out their most recent models and the map updates that 'bricked' them), and their testing hasn't been catching the problems. Their Director/VP of Engineering probably isn't the most popular guy in the building right now. Then again, in classic form, he probably warned them that the product wasn't ready to ship, either. I'd LOVE to know whether the Dutch word for "show stopper" exists anywhere in their process documents for taking a product to market.
