TomTom's iPhone car kit promo video is enticing, but still no mention of price or release date
By Ross Miller 
posted Aug 22nd 2009 3:46AM
posted Aug 22nd 2009 3:46AM
[Thanks, Arthur]
See more video at our hub!
Please note: If you're a current Engadget commenter, you do not need to re-register. Simply login and you will be prompted to select a username.
lol. The carrier says T-Mobile in the beginning.
Tom Tom is a Dutch Company.
The Dutch iPhone Carrier is T-Mobile :)
Dang, thought I was being clever.
You mean there are other countries outside of America??
"You mean there are other countries outside of America??"
Pretty hard to imagine!
oh yea so if they are referring to the the dutch T-Mobile why are they mapping driving directions in New York City hmmm
Dutch people like to holiday too?
New York is old Dutch trading post. They are reclaimig it and soon resettling the people occupying it illegally to Alabama and Nebraska.
@Adderz
Hell, there are other countries INSIDE America. The U.S. doesn't cover both continents.
I'm American and my old iPhone was on T-Mo.
Another over-priced Iphone accessory.
Sexy!
Its an even better deal if you didnt pay for the maps :-P Not that i would ever do such a thing!
Its actually a nice looking bit of kit. I was looking for a car charger and windshield mount already so this would be perfect. After using TomTom and Sygic i can understand why they made it, GPS reception sucks. My 5 year old PDA gets a quicker more consistent connection than my new Jesus Phone.
Now I see that, this is much more than a hunk of plastic holding up a GPS enabled iPhone. And now I understand how this could work with the iPod Touch. But now, I am a bit disappointed in a new iPod touch possibly having GPS.. this mount not only has it built in, it is an integral piece of the puzzle for the next iPod touch.
I was hoping the next iPod touch would be an iPhone without the phone :) Ah well.
And actually, It would be great if Apple would release an ultra version of the iPod Touch with EVERYTHING but the phone...
EDGE/3G, wiifi, GPS, compass... just no GSM voice. It really would be the perfect solution for those who dont want to get into a full voice contract with ATT, and obviously, if one did not want too.. would not have to activate the EDGE/3G either. One can dream.
You sound british, in britain if they see a sucktioncap ring on a windshield they break open your car to get the expected device from the glovebox I hear, which is a reason people stop using suctioncaps, so this is a bit outdated 'technology'
I can has tomtom?
only if you getz rid ofs lolcatz speak
That hand model must have really big hands...
I was thinking the SAME thing!
They'd probably have an instant customer out of me if they can put it at 150 dollars. At 200 they might still get me, but I'd seriously think about it. At that price point I could just get a proper GPS and not worry about freaking out if I get a call when I'm heading into a complicated area.
From what I have previously read about this, the iPhone continues giving you voice directions even if you receive a call en route. This probably works because of the phone app being able to run in the background on the iPhone.
Maddy:
I don't know what you have been reading but it is incorrect.
The phone app does not run in the background. If a call comes in whilst using tomtom, the tomtom app closes in order for you to take the call and automatically runs again once you end the call.
It's a minor inconvenience that will hopefully be removed with simultaneous app support in a futur iphone OS revision.
I would want this more if the gps didn't become useless in areas where you don't have a cell signal... they still exist... on the other hand, my normal tomtom works perfectly w/o a cell reception...
You don't need a cell signal, the car kit works for iPod Touch as well. The maps are stored on your phone, not streamed online like Google Maps.
How is it useless w/o cell signal? iPhone 3G/3GS has aGPS which helps it acquire satellites quicker in accordance with your current location. Cell towers triangulation + GPS = better than non-assisted GPS.It doesn't mean it doesn't work w/o cell signal. As long as your iPhone has an unobstructed view of the sky it works fine, I've never had a problem. That's why the iPhone can usually locate you so quickly unlike non-assisted GPS devices like my Garmin which would take minutes to find where you are especially if you power it on at a completely different location from when you last used it.
and yes like Gogo said that maps are stored on the device itself, not loaded wirelessly from cell data service as you drive if that was what you were referring to. That's why the TomTom app is over 1.2GB ~
really? just how might your phone know where you are w/o a signal? the maps being on the phone and knowing where you are, are two different things.
The iPhone has a GPS in it. It does not need to rely on a cell tower to know where you are, much like a regular GPS unit doesn't usually have a cell chip in it. Even the iPod touch can use as long as you get the kit (it needs the kit because it does NOT have a GPS).
I'm sorry, but are you having a laugh? What possibly makes you think that a cellular signal is necessary for GPS to function? You could use your iPhone's GPS function in the arctic as long as it functioned at that temperature. The only aspect that the cellular signal is used for is to try and establish your position if the device cannot actually see the satellites (such as when you are indoors) and to try an accelerate the initial position determination. Most GPS devices do not have cellular network connections and the TomTom software on the iPhone does not need it.
@demiurgical - Not extactly right. While iPhone has aGPS, using the already known coordinates of cell towers to more quickly attain it's position, this does not make it better than non-assisted GPS.
The (gps) antenna in the iPhone is much smaller and much less accurate than most standalone GPS. Assistance (aGPS) is neccessary for the iPhone to quickly acquire satellites. However, the iPhone's GPS is still accurate enough for the majority of street navigation.
TeleNav only works with a cell signal, as the maps are loaded on the fly and are constantly updated via the cell network. I think that's where he's getting confused.
Ah, crap. I hope I am wrong on this but I am not seeing any mention of FM Transmission for playing back your music. The direct 3.5mm audio jack connection is going to great for those people with a car stereo that has an auxiliary input but mine doesn't and hence we are currently using a RoadTrip, which does the business. It's not a deal-breaker but it will take the shine off things a bit. Funny, but I could have sworn that this feature was announced in the past - am I going mad or did someone else see that too?
just plug it into your cassette adapter.
My car stereo might not be new but it isn't THAT old. It's a CD-player with support for MP3 playback but simply doesn't have an external 3.5mm socket to plug in an MP3 player (it plays MP3s burned onto a CD). Still, thanks for trying.
just plug it into your external FM transmitter.
Any idea how you would do that? As best as I can tell, the car kit uses the Dock connector on the iPhone/iPod and doesn't have a pass-through connector that would enable a connection to another Dock device. The 3.5mm audio connection looks like the only option but how would you go about attaching that to a device that uses the Dock connector? Or are you assuming that my FM transmitter is connected via the 3.5mm audio connector? I suppose an option might be to try and connect the cradle to a basic FM transmitter but I suspect that will be a messy solution, albeit one that might work.
Might as well just find yourself a relatively cheap car amp head with a 3.5 in.
The bigger question is, where's a dock passthrough, I can't think of how many modern cars have some sort of iPod integration via a dock cable, or the fact that people willing to spend this much money on a mount have installed 3rd party iPod integration such as blitzsafe, dice, dension, or have something like microsoft sync.... FM is a joke unless you are in a very rural area.
Sorry, I just saw your second post after the fact... I have found one cable that combines a usb input with a female aux input to bump back to a female dock connector. http://cablejive.com/universal-dock-converter
But this to me is a huge over site on TomTom's part, why not at least make two versions...? or will they offer a cable that does the same thing...?
too many questions
Well, we might end up moving countries again in the not-too-distant future, so perhaps I'll just make do with converting Apple AAC files to MP3 and burn them to CD, then just ensure that the next car has a stereo with an aux input. Buying another car stereo could be a solution but doesn't make sense if we are going to sell the car in the next couple of months. What is the worst part about all this is I was convinced that the cradle had an FM transmitter. I must be getting old and going senile or something.
Very slowly... feature by feature... the iPhone catches up with what I was doing on my WinMo phone about 8 years ago.
But don't even expect to be able to take a phone call while this is running; or, at least not until Apple implements multitasking....
Able to do it doesn't mean it's able to do it well. I have been using winmo for gps and after switching to iPhone I don't want to go back again. iPhone just integrates everything very well except true multitasking.
hmm.. you had a windows mobile phone in 2001 (presumably running Windows CE 3.0) that was doing turn-by-turn GPS navigation? In addition to all the other things that the iPhone does; music (playback and purchasing) apps, decent mobile web browsing, movie playback, wifi etc.. etc..
Since the iphone is now playing catch-up to Pocket PC 2002, I'd suggest turning off your iphone and really attempting to use an 8 year old winmo device and see how that works for you. Enjoy the flimsy stylus and activesync!
Way to be literal there, Mike. You know, takedowns like that only work if someone misses the point completely.
And the point stands - people are getting really excited about things that Windows Mobile phones have been able to do for a long time (this is hardly the first time it's happened). Shinrajp: WinMo has TomTom already. Why do you presume that the iPhone will do TomTom "better" somehow? It's the exact same software.
Hi-Five!
i bet that WinMO didnt crap out battery life. Buy Tomtom then a week later buy a new iphone!
What kind of diss is that? So what if Winmo could do it years ago? You do realize the iPhone platform is only two years old and it pretty much trumps all other mobile software out there. This, by the way, coming from someone who was a Nokia fanboy for several years.
I could imaging increase in criminal activity.. :) people would just break the car window that car kit.. :)
Why? Can you see anything that physically distinguishes this from other windshield mounts such that someone would break into a car for it? Damned if I can.
@tongteh
Work on making complete sentences, then come back.
What I want to see is a feature comparison with Tom Tom's device lineup. Am I wrong here, or do you have to shell out $99 for the app plus $200 more for the mount? I mean, what's the big advantage here to tying up your iPhone as a nav device over buying a dedicated Tom Tom? Logically it should be the price, since they're using your existing iPhone hardware... but it sounds really pricey to me.
"Am I wrong here, or do you have to shell out $99 for the app plus $200 more for the mount?"
No one knows yet. Current reports of costs are based on rumour only and therefore are probably wrong. I am more interested to know, at the moment, as to how the the kit and software are going to be bundled, if at all. I'm certainly expecting a discount if I am going to buy both the software and kit but it is not clear how TomTom could implement such a scheme. At this time I suspect a mail-in rebate scheme or something since they can hardly put the software in the box...
100 bucks for the app and 100 bucks for the mount, 200 in total, not 300
No the $200 price includes the software. You enter in a product code and it'll download it off the app store.
Anyway, I like it.
Hang on - so they aren't allowing traffic info through a data connection and now I find out there is no connection for an RDS-TMC receiver! I'm not going to bother with this just yet then. Maybe the next version will actually be something worth having. I don't really want a satnav that can't handle calls properly, has no way to getting traffic info, no custom anything, no integration with online data..... a very very poor attempt from TomTom, and I had such high hopes too.
because, you know, listening to the radio is so hard right? Any big city will have a radio station that updates traffic status every 5-10 minutes.
So does this work with iPhone 2G? I heard something like this before - iPhone 2G using the GPS reciever of the TomTom car kit.
That's a good question. I would think it might because the use of the eternal chip.
like i said in another comment, considering that WITH the kit that it should work on an ipod touch, it should work fine on a 2G.
that thing looks awkward as hell
btw. im just kidding.
The press release states "Compatibility with iPod touch and other iPhone models coming soon." Does this indicate that the next iPod touch will have GPS? Obviously you can't do real-time navigation with the Wi-Fi based location capabilities of the current model.
It's a very nice video; however, imagine having the usb power connector and mini-jack for audio connected to the side of car kit and then rotating it like they do in the video. Not a pretty sight at all.
It would have been much better if they had a single cable off the back of the kit that had power and audio (something like the Griffin AutoPilot). Most people will certainly have both cables connected all the time.
So close...
Can't get around charger cable but for a BT car stereo, no cable needed.
Iphone 3GS BT doesn't music streaming.
Argh, you're right. I was close to buying this as soon as it came out; now I may wait for version 2 to see if they implement your sensible solution of routing the cables to the non-rotating part.
@ Charles
Yes it does.
@Klemon
Have you ever tried to get a GPS lock on your iPhone without a cell signal? It should work in theory, but doesn't seem to work in practice. In fact, it's so hosed up, I believe something in the iPhone is blocking this functionality. I've tried on a hillside in Vermont with clear view of the sky and waited 5 minutes, none of the GPS apps could get a location.
I have also tried to use other GPS apps without a cell signal with no luck...for hours, not minutes, so I too believe that the iPhone is blocking this functionality. Has anyone found a way around this?
I've never had this problem. Just a data point.
may be off topic but i tried GPS on my tmobile Android G1 , i dont have a data plan and did walking carrying G1 with me , a gps app gave me co-ordinates and changed them while i was moving , i tried the GPS measure app which measured the exact distance which i walked(actually its displacement, not the distance) , so by this GPS will work without data connection for sure and its very accurate if it can see clear sky , didn't try it in any malls.
This is EXACTLY what I want to know!
I have geo-tagging enabled on my camera app and had roaming data disabled while on a snowboarding trip at the beginning of the year. So I launch the app, leave it running for a while (5-10 mins) with perfect clear skies all around. I take a few photos of people coming down the mountain and find the photos have no location information at all :(
No location info on a picture isn't too bad, but the idea of needing data to use a GPS map of the whole of Europe doesn't appeal to me.
anybody know who does the music and what it's called? it's pretty good!
just shazam it.
I did this 3 different times just for fun and to see what would come up, and it came up nothing. Ah well it was worth a try.
$200 and we lose the use of the GPS if we need to use the phone, iPod, or Internet?
Why would I buy this when I can pick up a dedicated TomTom unit for $110 at Best Buy? Using a TomTom and the iPhone in tandem is a much superior solution, and it's about half the cost.
I really like my TomTom GPS unit, and would like to have one on my iPhone, but especially considering how the TomTom will "eat" most of the functionality of the iPhone while it's in use there's no way I'll pay what they're asking. I will have to rely on the competition to undercut TomTom on price, and go with someone else instead. Do I hear $40, anyone?
If you look closely at the video, the cradle has a GPS chip built into it. This raises several interesting questions: Is the iPhone built-in GPS functionality just not good enough to work with Tom Tom's maps source if I dont buy the cradle? If it is good enough, why should I have to pay for two chipsets, one in the phone and one in the cradle? Frankly, I think this is Tom Tom's way of holding onto some of the hardware margins, although small, for as long as they can and make their money on the software. Since they get their maps from a third party (NAVTEQ I think), their only real value is the user interface software and there are plenty of other provider knocking on that door. I think the writing is on the wall for standalone PND device providers like Garmin, Magellan, etc.
Or maybe they want to be able to sell the mount and software to the millions of existing Touch users that don't have GPS.
I'd just like to remind you that the first generation iPhone doesn't have a GPS chip.
The 3G built-in GPS works just fine with Tomtom for me. In fact I think the voice commands are plenty loud too. I'm not really seeing much need for this if you have a 3G/3GS.
I hate to say it, but for $200 I would rather just go ahead and buy an actual TomTom GPS. I have an iPaq 5915x w/TomTom and absolutely love it. I love my iPhone 3GS but it just seems silly to spend $200 on an app and window mount when that money could buy an actual GPS unit and free up my iPhone for phone, music and email on trips.
Am I the only one who thinks this price point is ludicrous? I've bought 2 TomToms in the last 2 years, one was $100 the other was $79. They are dedicated GPS units and work pretty well, they stay in the car and needn't be hooked up every time.
This kit is a slap in the face if you ask me. TomTom is basically giving us the PRIVILEGE to pay them $200 (which buys a VERY nice dedicated unit BTW) for:
- a clip on mount
- software
- NO SCREEN
- nearly no hardware
The whole kit should be $50, not $200. I use my 3Gs frequently for GPS but the dedicated unit is better and WAY cheaper. PLUS you can resell them if you upgrade.
Dunno if I'm shelling out the money for tom tom but I really like that mounting dock just for use by itself!
You like the mount? You can get almost the exact same mount for RAM Mounts for less than $20. Plus you get get different back for it, i.e. window, bike, dash, etc.
@Abouna where, please? I've been looking for a decent car mount with a dock connector, and (like Jim) think the TomTom mount might be it. But the RAM site only shows mounts *without* a dock connector.
I only want this car kit to mount my phone, i have no desire to purchase the tomtom app but since they integrated a GPS chip into the dock i know it's going to be too expensive for that purpose.
Ok... try using GPS on an iphone on a back road in the middle of nowhere with your AT&T coverage. Talking to a satellite is so much more reliable.
I find it interesting how many people think you need a cellphone signal in order to use GPS on an iPhone. I wonder why that is? Standalone GPS units don't need a cellphone signal, so why should the iPhone?
I'm guessing the way that Google Maps downloads map images over the cellular network adds to the confusion. But that's just the images; the phone still shows a GPS position even if the phone has no signal.
As an iPhone owner and someone who has tried 2 of the nav apps, the GPS chip isnt the greatest. It will get the job done, but if you are someone who is a bit paranoid and overly concerned, I would think about getting the mount kit.
As for the people concerned with not not having an AUX jack for music, there are 2 easy solutions to correct that. First, you can go to Best Buy or any car stereo store and have them install an AUX jack for you for $25-50. Second, you can do it yourself for $5. Just go buy a stereo headphone to RCA adapter cable from Radio(The)Shack, or WalMart. Then just connect it to the Audio In on the back of your stereo and run the headphone jack end out to where you want it inside the car. Done.
So, for the price of a Garmin Nuvi (GPS app + kit), I can have a lesser experience on my iPhone than on the Garmin.
Sign me up!
Thats so expensive. Nokia's 5800 Nav. edition is a much better choice and cheaper option, especially
if one is buying a new phone + this GPS car kit.
The guy in the video had really large hands! The iphone looked tiny when he was holding it.
I guess no one takes rides with others? My iPhone is with me, another GPS, not so much.
Release the think already. Or provide some sort of release date. Looks like an excellent accessory for the iPhone but it was announced weeks ago. Find it somewhat annoying the waiting game with no expectation set by TomTom for the items release. Maybe I should stop caring and thus end my desire to buy one. I was hoping to stop carrying a dedicated GPS in my backpack when traveling - but the wait continues. Have the Navigon software on my iPhone now but it could be better. Navigon beat TomTom to the punch with their software and appears to have better overall ratings. If Navigon releases TTS and dynamic traffic AND it works with the TomTom car kit - it may be the better choice (at current price).
Wow, that is awesome! Nothing comes close to the i-phone!!!
So if you have your phone in a case of some sort, you need to remove it before using this. That's a pain. Granted it would be difficult to accommodate all cases...but none?
I'm not a iPhone user, but I do use a Verizon Samsung Omnia and their Verizon Navigator program. I have a very nice large screen GPS that i use when i am driving my personal vehicle. I have had my present car for less than a year and have over 65K miles on it for work. But I also fly around the country and drive rental cars on a regular basis. When i am traveling in just use my Omnia and the Verizon Navigator program. For business people that already travel light for a day trip or an over-night trip carry a laptop bag, carry-on bag etc.. the thought of carrying your GPS unit is not very appealing, but you wouldn't dream of leaving your phone behind.
As for this kit and mount, it occurs to me that if you leave the mount in your car and plugged in, does the onboard chip always stay in sync with the GPS satellites so when you get in the car and plug in your iPhone there is no waiting for it to find the location. That would be a nice feature. Also does it use the external chip all the time even on a 3G/GS when in the cradle to offload the work from the phone itself so that you can still do calls and play music while using the GPS app?
Phone GPS can perfectly be used as regular GPS , but google doesnt allow its maps to be used by other turn by turn navigating software such ad telenav etc. the chip on dock may be for 1st Gen iphone and ipod touch , its pretty useless for iphone 3G/3GS
May be off topic but i tried GPS on my tmobile Android G1 , i dont have a data plan and did walking carrying G1 with me , a gps app gave me co-ordinates and changed them while i was moving , i tried the GPS measure app which measured the exact distance which i walked(actually its displacement, not the distance) , so by this GPS will work without data connection for sure and its very accurate if it can see clear sky , didn't try it in any malls.