TomTom score another own goal...

My disgust at TomTom's board of directors got ramped up another step today, while I was catching up with the events of the Mobile World Congress event, which was held in Barcelona over the 16th to the 19th of February.

Hells bells, in their efforts to avoid answering questions that will aid potentially loyal customers into staying with TomTom products, their marketing director ducked away from the guys from Pocket GPS World when they tried to talk to them about TT7 for PDA/PPC, citing "drinks with friends", a rather pitiful and typical "I don't wanna talk to you" move.

I'll remind you all that following the last retail release of TomTom for PDA/PPC, version 6, the only v7 release has been available in Germany only, and on ONE specific model of HTC cellular phone. Again, the last retail version was version 6, and that was nigh-on THREE YEARS ago. In all that time, there have been no map updates for v6 PPC/PDA users, and no commitment to release any form of upgrade to the next version, or even a release of the next version come to that.

Now, there have been rumours that TomTom might - emphasis MIGHT - be looking at releasing a retail PPC/PDA TTv7 (the current version of their Personal Navigation Device firmware (PND) is version 8.302, I should point out), but given their shoddy treatment of PDA/PPC users over the last couple of years, I wouldn't hold your breath.

Frankly, the above shows TTs entire attitude to the core of loyal customers that helped them get to where they are today (the PDA/PPC users), before they'd even sold their first stand-alone Personal Navigation Device (PND). Frankly, I think that kind of attitude on the part of TT really sucks, and deserves to be treated with the contempt it deserves, by moving ones loyalty (and hard earned money) to another manufacturer.

Frankly, for a stand-alone SatNav product that does not require an active internet connection in order to function, I'd look at CoPilot, or something similar; the latest release of CP can handle OV2 POI files, which is a definite plus if you use Point Of Interest files on your current TT SatNav.

So. In summary, Google and the like march on with the hot-downloadable GoogleMaps (and similar) free navigation tools, and the other stand alone manufacturers are supporting PDA/PPC users.

Can one say TomTom scores an own goal?

One can.

Ptptptptptptptptptptpt to TomTom, then