TomTom Prices iPhone Car Kit Comments

hahahahah.

No.

TomTom clearly haven't understood the whole satnav on a phone thing. It's supposed to be a cheaper, more convenient alternative to a standalone.
CoPilot on the other hand have (at least on Android) - UK and Ireland only £25, none of that silly subscription nonsense.

Pretty sure that when I glanced at this on the UK Apple store yesterday, £99.99 was the pre-order price for both the cradle and the app...

Haha!! Someone needs to tell TomTom it's too late for April Fools. I bought a cheap holder from eBay to go along with a charger/mp3 input, all for less than £30, to use with my Navigon app.

Go back to your dedicated devices TomTom, and leave the iPhone to Navigon and Co-Pilot.

£100 for the cradle?! Are the taking the whizz?! I think a lot of us will wait till they crop-up on Ebay at that... The kudos of owning Tom Tom on an iPhone isn't THAT appealing! Do you reckon the idiots in their marketing department know there's a recession on?

@Gordon - Ah, confusion reigns! (Unusually, for the normally slippery slick Apple PR Machine) - I see through numerous threads that the ad on the UK Apple site did originally say 99.99 for both the cradle and the app but that this was amended later in the day by a press release stating that the 99.99 only got you the cradle... In any case, ouch, truly crazy price and speaking as someone who'd been hanging on, I'll be off to purchase one of the alternate apps later today!

I think Simon was right - this was selling on the Apple store for £99.99 all in, but Apple got their facts wrong.

http://recombu.com/news/tomtom-iphone-car-kit-in-uk-apple-store-for-100_M11107.html

Quite right, on the danish store yesterday it was with the app, I read it myself. Thinking that this was actually not a bad price as then matching their entry level standalone models.
Then I come in the office today and they've back tracked.

Needless to say, the deal ain't so appealing now.

Ha! It appears they have discovered iPricing.

Original release made a mistake saying it included the app. As Simon stated, it was later "amended".

One other point though: if they say it'll support the iPhone 2G, why not the iPod Touch?

Good lesson for TomTom and others to learn. Just cos it's an iPhone app doesn't mean that you can charge Apple prices.

Because the iPod Touch doesn't have a GPS chip. It can determine where it is by interrogating wi-fi base stations but that isn't good enough for proper GPS navigation.

"Bluetooth speaker phone." Since it's a dock, with you know, a physical connection, why use a wireless protocol?!?

interesting point made, though, the iphone 3g/3gs has a crap gps.

i've used the 3gs's gps to walk me to places (via googlemaps) and half the time it thinks i'm in croydon.

I gave up a while ago and decided that a mount and Europe version of TomTom for iPhone would cost more than the latest TomTom One IQ Routes Europe so I bought the latter. It just sits there and does it's job perfectly with no worries about (lack of) multitasking etc. The iPhone just plays music to my car stereo and has Google Maps showing the motorway traffic - for my once a week motorway journeys this is so much more effective financially than something like HD traffic. I may still get Co-Pilot UK edition for iPhone to give me 'emergency' satnav for when the TomTom is at home. Alternatively, Google Maps will probably suffice ..

Has nobody considered the fact that maybe TomTom doesnt want people using their iphone app, as this could be deemed competition for their stand alone products? Maybe profit margin is higher on the latter, in which case answer is to price yourselves out of the market.

tom tom clearly know apple customers

@james1000
Why bother making an app in the first place then? Obviously it can't be too cheap but to price it at par with their standalone products is just senseless.

@mikfrak: the iPhone 2G doesn't have a GPS receiver either.

@james1000: no.

I think this is just the difficulty that companies have with adapting to changes in the market. Tomtom came from a hardware/software business and so the hardware division will want to continue, not be made redundant by mobile phones. However, they'll work it out soon enough and they will have to adapt. In time, the software will be their main focus and eventually they'll stop making hardware and either drop or price reasonably their cradle.

@ilovethemonkeyhead, interesting point made, though, the iphone 3g/3gs has a crap gps.

I would take your IPhone back to the shops, my IPhone3g is smack on, no problems whatever. Last week used Co-Pilot to to Center Parcs at Longleat a round trip of 580 miles, Co-Pilot quit a few times but the GPS had a perfect lock all the way. In fact I can only remember one time it lost a lock, but it recovered within a few seconds.

Btw. bought a Griffin Roadtrip for the IPhone £40, works really well as Car kit. With the advantage that you can use your car speakers for playing your ITunes, without any wires. :) And as an FM transmitter it's really clear.