Tomtom Live and Road Angel Prof

[grgrgray]

I posted this in another thread but thought it needed its own thread.

I use a TomTom Live sat nav, previously used a road angel navigator. Both use Road Angels fixed and mobile speed camera database and both have the facility for a driver to report the location of a speed camera van by pressing a 'report mobile camera' button which you can place on the front screen of the tomtom unit. Once reported, the warning stays active for 2 hours and warns all other drivers that they are about to enter an area with potential danger.

Its not an obvious feature of the tomtom devices and that’s why I mention it here, apologies if your currently sucking on eggs.

So for the purposes of road safety, I urge anyone with tomtom live services to make use of this feature and help everyone maintain road safety.

[thetapeworm]

Interesting, I was under the impression this feature simply added it to the database when you synchronised with Home on your PC so that the location was there as a permanent "they could be here" type of warning.

I use an application called Waze on my phone which gives real time warnings out to other users in the area for this type of thing (and traffic etc) and that works OK but is in it's infancy in the UK.

[grgrgray]

This uses the phone network (gprs) to talk to a server when your on the move. It only refers to the tomtom live services which are subscription based. Not come across Waze before.

I drive 1000 miles per week with my job and its testement to its effectivness that after using the road angel service for 5 years I have a point free licence. I had 9 points 6 years ago.

[thetapeworm]

I'll have to look at this again then, I have the XL Live unit but rarely use it unless I am going somewhere I don't know too well. I used to drive around with it on collecting stats for TomTom to use for IQ Routes etc but never seemed to benefit from it so stopped.

Then when the maps grew to over 2GB and wouldn't go on my device I got even more irritated with them, maybe I need to chill out a bit

[thenortherner]

I got a Tomtom Live unit just after they were released a couple of years ago. It was crap - very slow and continually crashed, forcing you to do a complete reset. Not great in the middle of a journey.

Two years on and I was in need of a new system a few weeks ago, with european maps and bluetooth connectivity for my phone. I decided to go with Tomtom again hoping that the Live system and the unit had improved.

I've got to say this time it's a totally different story. The unit is excellent. It has proved its worth twice over the past 4 weeks without a doubt. Last week the M4 was closed in both directions near Swindon - it warned me of the road closure and redirected me.

And today it notified me of a live camera in a 40 mph zone in roadworks on the M6 at Stoke.

The built in Tomtom database is pretty useless though, even though it's fully up to date,

I use pocketgpsworld.com for weekly updates and run both databases parallel so I've got the best of both worlds.

Most of the Live units come with 12 months free subscription.