Rubbish battery and "Way-too-fast" trip time?

[dwdionis]

Decided to post some personal TomTom related thoughts here:

First of all, the battery seems completely useless - and/or dead.

It's rated for several hours of use - right?

Well it might have been before. These days, it might charge to full, solid green in the car on the charger. Once you use it though, it'll go down to the middle and yellow in far less than an hour. Sometimes after being off overnight. Not too impressive. Cord is a pain to take out for short trips.

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Secondly, I'm going to NYC from Burlington, MA this Friday.

Mapquest, Google Maps, and TomTom online routes say 3:50 approx.

My GPS seems to think I'm gonna get there in 3:17. I said all-good for HOV lanes and TOLL roads.

Something I'm missing here?

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And lastly - how many people here think RDS-TMC is any good?

The traffic into is totally useless for anything but highways it seems. Never, ever get reports for any smaller roads. I guess this is where you get the online traffic?

Rush hour is certainly impossible to beat, it seems.

 

[Hardgrafte]

Agree - battery life is quite poor. I guess being exposed to the full heat of the sun etc does reduce its life somewhat.

But you can get a huge increase in life if you set the unit up to 'dim between instructions'. On a long highway drive it will light up about 2 miles before having to make a turn.

Only problem for me, is that on mt TT730 this option has ceased to work since about a year ago ...

 

[dhn]

All Tomtom units are meant to be used with the included car charger, that's why they are provided.

Think you are seeing the effect of IQ routing reflected in the ETA that TomTom is showing. It uses historical real-world driving data to reflect its route and time to arrive.

Simply put, people drive faster than the posted speed limit and the TomTom reflects that. Google, Yahoo anf the Planner do not.