TomTom GPS software
 

Here is my response to an email to TomTom about getting their PDA GPS software ported to the Nokia 770. It is good and bad. Bad is that they think the Nokia 770 is a phone. The good is that are looking into it.

Dear Mr Bellve,

Currently, we do not have support for this phone. We are going to be testing this phone. However, right now, we can not guarantee any functionality with this phone.

We do apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.

With best regards,

The TomTom Customer Support Team

Yeah, typical support/management type answer. I used to work for a GPS navigation company actually. Errrr, lets call them by the hypothetical name, ummmm, Nafman. If TomTom are anything like they are you'll have a load of very, very smart engineers behind things and a bunch of *****s managing and marketing the things. Geeks love GPS and the idea and uses behind it. I am sure there are engineers at TomTom who have the device or seen it and would be thinking i wonder if we can get our stuff to run on this. From your reply though I doubt they even pass on your email to anyone with a technical clue. You got a form reply for all the people who must contact them saying 'it would be really cool to get this running on XXX phone'. I don't know how big TomTom is in terms of people but when a company gets past a certain size those geeks with the cool ideas are so far removed from the management nothing new comes out of them. Their dreams and aspirations are crushed! But I'm not bitter :) Apple seem to do rather well though for a big company. Well, at the moment.

Hmmm that might be the difference between Tomtom and Na*man...geeks in the right places...

See Jonek's reply to my blog here.

I still don't know if good, accurate, and user-friendly mapping data is out there for it.

I am currently using GPS Drive on the 770. It is newly ported and works well for a brand new port but it has a clunky UI that I am still tring to figure out.

kbellve: Where do you get your mapping data?

I would be very suprised if they haven't already got it running on a developer's system, considering the hardware/software is supposed to be very similar to their own units I expect if they didn't have development time in the office somebody worked on it at home for fun.

The question is how much it would cost to get to market - I expect there is quite a high break-even point and there would need to be a few more 770's shipped yet.

Gareth

@770

Gpsdrive has a function to download map data from expedia. It gets a map based upon your current location. There is a perl script to help your retrieve more maps but I don't think perl has been ported to the 770 yet.

Yep, that's exactly right. Even engineers can see there is no point putting effort into something you'll only sell to three people! I don't think Nokia has sold as many 770s as they'd like people to think.

Considering the software already works under Linux, the effort involved in creating a 770 port should be minimal. Of course, it wouldn't be a technical person making the decision to support the 770.

There is also the issue of how you would use the 770, say in a car.
Dock/cradle etc...

my GPS receiver came with a free PDA cradle for the car...I tried it last night driving home with the Nokia 770. Lets say..it was free and it did work but I am sure there are better solutions.

Plus, I wish there was a way to keep the screen from blanking.

Sorry, I meant for the 770.. Guess you could "appropriate" a current one.

I say no thanks to half assed ported software. Don't give companies reason to do so. I think thats a bigger turn off to new users than having a small but good library, and will ultimately kill the device, and is a reason why I think linux on the desktop isn't gaining much ground.

I think I've wasted a good few hours installing several of the apps on the maemo wiki, and most of them were wastes of time.

@770

The PDA cradle works for the 770.