Filed under: iPhone
TomTom car kit makes first appearance in the (UK) wild
It's here, at least if you are in the U.K. One of our readers tipped us that he was able to buy the TomTom kit for £99.95 from the Apple Store at Bluewater in Kent.The kit has its own GPS chip which is supposed to be more sensitive than the GPS chip built into the iPhone. The car kit is listed as 'coming soon' at the U.S. Apple Store. It's expected to cost US$119.95, and when added to the cost of the TomTom app brings the total to more than $200.
That high price has caused some to question paying that much money for a GPS unit, when a standalone model can be bought for less. We'll be following the user comments on the car kit, and hope to get one ourselves for testing soon.
The whole category of GPS solutions for the Phone is moving very fast, and it seems almost every week a new app comes out with more and more features giving the iPhone parity with the separate units you can buy.
TomTom hopes to offer a high performance solution while still letting a person carry one device that does it all, unless you count the car kit as another device, of course.
Thanks to Stu for the tip.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Brandon said 1:19AM on 10-13-2009
Since it has a standalone GPS chip in it, could this work with the iPod Touch?
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Dave said 12:32PM on 10-13-2009
If it can, I'm going to seriously consider getting one.
Chris Liphart said 11:48PM on 10-12-2009
I was just about to ask the same thing.
dagamer43 said 11:51PM on 10-12-2009
Yes.
TIm said 4:45AM on 10-13-2009
No it doesn't .. at least according to the product description in the apple web store .. it is 3G and 3Gs only.
T.
Ben said 12:41PM on 10-13-2009
Yes it will work with the iPhone 2G and the iPod Touch. That's what TomTom has said.
Scott Brown said 10:16PM on 10-16-2009
Wow. That means if going by current exchange rate this in total is going to coast over or around $300 AUD.
Come on TomTom. I think you need to rethink your pricing if this is the case.
I meant in Total including the app should be around $150 max. This is only my opinion.
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Ian said 12:52AM on 10-13-2009
Man, I don't know where you get your exchange rates from but current exchange rates on $200USD are: $220AUD.
Even with the Australia tax, you should be able to get the entire thing for ~$250
L3 said 12:22AM on 10-13-2009
24.99 last year for my G-Map GPS and I just got another free upgrade.
I am liking the tomtom mount with their chip for my current set up. Why does that unit need to cost $120?!? How about $50?
I would switch and buy both the tomtom app and their mount for about $100 total -- wait a minute, NO I WOULDN'T!!!
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Farris said 3:13AM on 10-13-2009
Or you can jailbreak and use xGPS for free on a 3G or 3G(s), or with the slight added cost of an external GPS receiver on a Touch (something like 80 bucks IIRC).
Granted, xGPS isn't perfect, but the price is right.
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bikeham said 4:18AM on 10-13-2009
I'm in Australia and have had 3 tomtom gps' so far and each of them has had dreadful mounts. The kind you think are on but fall off; I hope the iPhone mount is better.
Now let's talk about crappy maps - I live in a rural area and like to go camping. There are many map errors and omissions that I have encountered and things are improving. But not enough that they should brag about the accuracy of their maps.
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Mauro said 4:54AM on 10-13-2009
Actually, right now the car kit is already available in the European verions of the tomtom.com/iphone website. It is not in the US and Australia
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mark dawber said 6:02AM on 10-13-2009
I too was hoping that the car kit would provide GPS functionality to the iPhone 2G or iTouch so I contacted TomTom Tech Support. Here is their reply:
Thank you for contacting TomTom Customer Care
The reference number for your query is 091012-035190.
I can confirm (unfortunately) that the car kit for the i-phone will not make non-gps i-phones compatible to use with the TomTom application.
With Kind Regards
The TomTom Customer Care Team
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Ben said 12:44PM on 10-13-2009
The press release that TomTom sent out about the car kit says that it WILL be compatible with the iPhone 2G.
http://investors.tomtom.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=411360
sd karte said 8:41AM on 10-13-2009
I bought the $99 TomTom iPhone app and a $20 vent clip cellphone holder, been using the combination as well as the aux jack on my truck with my iPhone car charger and the whole setup works great! I find positioning to work just find, and I don't get the maps are out of date, mine seem to be just fine!
sd karte
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Vasquez said 10:53AM on 10-13-2009
This mount looks attractive to me because I've been looking for a mount that will:
-Attach to my windshield
-Charge my iPhone, without having to plug something in seperately
-Grabs audio from the dock connector and outputs it through AUX out so I can plug it into my stereo.
So far, I have yet to find a car mount that does all 3..... but I would love to hear some suggestions.
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pl_svn said 1:02PM on 10-13-2009
... well...
- it does attach to your window
- it will charge your phone but... you have to plug "something" to it ;-)
- it will grab *music* only from the dock connector: voice directions and calls will *only* go to it's speaker via bluetooth! :-0
so... ;-(
Juaquin said 11:23AM on 10-13-2009
Why would you buy only a mount for $120 when you can get a whole GPS unit for under $100? That's just dumb. Sure, it would be nice for your phone to be an all-in-one, but considering you have the mount, that's not the case. And even if you only used the phone sans mount, you still have issues with playing music or actually using the phone while running GPS.
All-in-all it's a pretty bad solution that's only going to appeal to people who must have everything for their iPhone regardless of how useless it really is.
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grangerfx said 3:32PM on 10-13-2009
Could someone that owns one of these please try connecting it to an iPod Touch and let us know if it works? Test it with location aware apps and see if it can find your current location when you are not near any WiFi.
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Chris said 11:31AM on 10-14-2009
The TomTom app is worthless. It never recognizes addresses and always has trouble finding a GPS signal. I have reverted to using the maps app over the TomTom app I paid $100 for. Also, I bought a car mount kit for my iPhone for $30.00. It doesn't have the GPS chip built into it that apparently the TomTom kit will have, but why does that chip make the price go up so much?
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