Sunday, June 26, 2011

TomTom–owning multiple devices can be a pain

The weirdest requirement of owning a TomTom GPS device: If you have multiple devices that you use at the same time (eg: one for your car and one for your wife’s), then you can only have one device registered to an email account at a time.

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http://uk.support.tomtom.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/10079/~/linking-devices-to-your-mytomtom-account

How PAINFUL!

Even worse, I had a TomTom device a long time back. I bought a new one in January of this year and it was working with my original computer without a problem. But since I got my new laptop, TomTom Home 2 continuously recognizes my XXL 550 device as a TomTom One device. The biggest problem with that: I had registered a LifeTime map update service for my XXL 550 and it no longer gets picked up by my TomTom Home2. So I am unable to get the latest maps.

Now, I have to spend time calling the customer service department (which is not open on a sunday) and get a solution for this. I just hope they have a solution, cause I paid good money for the LifeTime map service for my XXL.

You would think that the TomTom account would allow you to register multiple devices and that you could manage your subscriptions through their web-portal, but No! none of that is possible. You would think that the TomTom Home 2 software would automatically determine the device attached to the computer, use its serial number to determine what kind of TomTom device it is and also show you the different services associated with the device – again, not thought of! Without both of these basic features, my recent experience with the device has been very frustrating.

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TomTom web-portal shows my active device as XXL TomTom Home 2 shows the currently connected device as TomTom One and the “Change Device” option never enables itself – EVER!

Hopefully, the customer service call ends up being less frustrating.

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