The Practice of Code

One of the most anticipated accessories made for the iPhone is the TomTom Car Kit. This is a standalone suction cup cradle with a couple of funky extra features:

1. Your iPhone can rotate in the cradle a full 360° allowing it to be viewed in either portrait or landscape mode.
2. The unit has its own GPS hardware inside, enabling much greater accuracy and less power consumption from the phone.
3. The unit has its own microphone and speaker promising greater call fidelity.
4. An audio out port to enable the output of directions and music through your car stereo.

So how is it? Terrible.

One of the biggest initial complaints about the unit is its price tag. The unit sells for AUD 159.95 and that does not include navigational software. That’s right, you have to separately purchase the TomTom application from the app store which is currently AUD 99.99. However, I think the separation of the app and the cradle is a good thing, as the app works fine without the cradle and the cradle can be used with any GPS application. But, as some knowledgeable consumers may tell you, you can buy a dedicated GPS unit for well under the combined AUD 260 that the complete TomTom solution will cost you. Personally, I have not purchased the TomTom software as of yet. I’ve been holding out to see if Apple will be implementing similar turn-by-turn directions as Google has for their own device. I don’t have a problem paying high prices for perfection, but the TomTom Car Kit is far from perfection.

You can mount the cradle to your windscreen using the suction cup mount, or you can stick an adhesive disc to your dash and attach the suction cup mount to that. There is a strong ball joint between that and the rest of the cradle. The phone mount attaches to that bit where it can spin 360°. The cigarette light charger connects to the bottom right of the cradle using a standard small USB port which has become a popular charging interface. Unfortunately, it’s all downhill from here.

The location of the connector seems extremely ill conceived as the entire power cable rotates around with the iPhone at the most extreme end of the cradle. This means that you need to have quite a bit of slack in order to rotate your phone 90° and there is no way to discreetly position the cable. It seems obvious to me that the connector should have been behind the cradle as close to the center of the rotating mechanism as possible to avoid the cable rotating with the phone.

 

The next thing that most users don’t realize or expect is that the audio from the phone to the cradle occurs over Bluetooth. You must pair your phone with cradle while it is mounted and every time you mount the phone thereafter, the Bluetooth connection is activated and your audio passes through the cradle’s speaker. I found the sound quality of this speaker to be terrible. It sounded as if a proverbial treble dial was turned up to its maximum, while the bass and mid were turned to their minimum, creating a very harsh sound. I tested calling my partner, whom I have regularly spoken with before from my pre-existing car audio solution, and she said the sound quality was markedly better than usual.

Unfortunately, my car stereo does not have an audio auxiliary in port, so I was not able to test that feature. However, what many may not realise is that because the phone is using Bluetooth for the call audio, the call audio will not go through your cars speakers if you are using the auxiliary jack. The phone will still automatically fade out your music when a call comes in, but the audio will still be routed via Bluetooth to the aforementioned, accursed speaker.

The next issue I faced is an issue that I don’t blame on the design of the TomTom car kit, but rather is just a side effect of the warm, sunny climate I live in. Since you might live in a similar climate, it’s worth pointing out. The iPhone heats up intensely when in direct sunlight. It’s not designed with the same robustness to heat and direct sunlight the way my previous standalone GPS was, so after one hour of driving during the day, the iPhone decided it would work no further. Therefore, depending on your climate, the slant of your windshield and the layout of your car, you might want to consider a mount that is not exposed to direct sunlight.

Anyone that has ever driven or walked around while using Maps on their iPhone is probably familiar with the intense battery drain caused by the use of GPS combined with the 3G connection required to download the necessary maps. Unfortunately, to my bewilderment, it seems that the TomTom Car Kit and charger cannot keep up with that drain. Near the end of the 1.5 hour drive home from the Apple retail store from which I bought the cradle, I received a notice that I had less than 20% of iPhone battery remaining. I was shocked, as the battery icon in the menu bar indicated that the unit was fully charged!

Let me clarify.

When viewing the battery icon in an iPhone’s toolbar, there are three different states. If there is no icon within the battery indicator, it means that you’re running off the battery. If the lightning bolt is in the indicator, it means that your phone is plugged in and charging, but not full yet. If there is a plug icon in the indicator, it insinuates that your phone is plugged in and is now complete charged. It was this final state that my iPhone would reflect after being mounted in the TomTom Car Kit for 10-15 minutes regardless of my iPhone’s pre-existing charge.

While your phone is plugged in, if you sleep it, and wake it up again, there is a much larger battery indicator in the center of the screen. While the phone was claiming to be fully charged, checking the full size indicator clearly showed that it was not, and subsequent visits to that indicator in fact showed that the phone was losing power.

After consistently experiencing this behavior during the following week, I decided to go back to the Apple Store and see what they thought. The specialist I spoke with was not able to confirm if this was a common problem, faultiness or just bad design, as neither him, nor any other active staff, had had any first hand experienced with the cradle. So to play it safe, he recommended that I do an iPhone firmware restore; a DFU firmware restore. Knowing full well of the procedures required to troubleshoot such matters, I happily whipped out my MacBook, backed up my iPhone, and passed it over to him to perform the firmware restore on the spot.

After the firmware restore, I safely elected to not restore my personal data and settings, took the virgin phone back to my car and drove around for 15 minutes, and lo and behold, the same issue occurred. I returned to the store and informed the same specialist. He then authorised another specialist to give me a new TomTom cradle and I went for another drive. This time, I was not able to get the issue to repeat itself during the next 15 minutes. I went back, thanked him for his time, and began my 1.5 hour drive home. Unfortunately, 10 minutes in to that drive, it did occur again. To further remove potential variables, I inserted my partner’s iPhone into the cradle and after ten minutes, the cradle refused to charge her iPhone as well.

Finally, this morning I called TomTom Support in Australia and started to explain the issue I was having. Before I could even finish, the representative asked if he could interject and stated that, “It will charge the iPhone only so far as to maintain its existing charge, not replenish it.” I pointed out that in my case, the unit could not even do that over the course of a 1.5 hour drive. He stated that it was therefore likely to be defective and offered to coordinate a replacement. I informed him that I had already been provided a replacement. I asked him why the packaging stated, “Charges iPhone while driving”. He insisted that it does “charge”, just not beyond the existing battery level.

So there you have it, straight from TomTom’s mouth:

The TomTom Car Kit for iPhone will not replenish your iPhone’s power.

Even if I could get past all of the cradle’s other shortcomings, I consider the ability to charge my iPhone to be one of the most basic functions I would require from such a device, (especially an AUD 160 device), and without it, when I return to Brisbane next week, I will be returning the TomTom Car Kit for a full refund.