No iPhone TomTom car kit until October
By Michael W. Jones
The TomTom app for the iPhone is one half of a one-two combination punch. Much of the power of the punch is lost without the car kit, which has been delayed until October, along with its functionality.
There have been significant complaints about the performance of the TomTom app on the iPhone ever since it’s release less than a month ago, along with complaints about shortened battery life made worse by the application. In truth, both of those problems would be eased by the addition of the car kit, which is a major part of the equation from the TomTom point of view, according to an IntoMobile story. The car kit, of course, acts a a charger, but more importantly represents a a faster and more precise GPS unit than does the iPhone, which was intended primarily to be the processing part of the two-part TomTom plan.
The lack of the car kit is undoubtedly hurting sales, and giving users a poor impression of the TomTom app as well. The iPhone’s GPS unit was never intended to drive a turn-by-turn GPS application; rather, it was intended to give the phone a fix of the user’s location in order to locate stores and restaurants near the user, or to feed a weather program the user’s location for accurate weather information. Nor was the iPhone intended to go into heavy calculation mode and stay there for the hours on end required for a road trip.
Therefore, it came as a bit of a surprise when TomTom recently announced that the car kit, which many thought would be available at the same time or shortly after the app, was once again delayed. In the announcement, the company said, “The TomTom car kit availability was originally planned for this summer. But we have decided to take some extra weeks in order to deliver the highest quality on this innovative product. So, the car kit will become available this October on www.tomtom.com.”
TomTom has not announced what has caused the delays in the delivery of the car kit for the iPhone, but it is clear that the lack of the kit is causing customer complaints that would not be there if the kit was available. This is probably the first time that TomTom has built this sort of auxiliary device, but they are still basically a hardware company. Prospective clients are probably already beginning to question the veracity of TomTom’s abilities in this new marketplace, and the company has probably already lost whatever lead they had in this area because of the delays. They need to deliver the iPhone car kit very soon in order to retain their reputation as a GPS innovator.
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