A New Hope - TomTom Rider 550

[RBEmerson]

Ooops, wrong opening.

Enough with my Zumo 660, and with Garmin in general. Time for a new hope: a TomTom Rider 550. Like there's a lotta choice on this...

I've just unboxed the TT (not Tourist Trophy but TomTom - with two capital T's) 550 (note, adding Rider in front matters in the TomTom world - no Rider means another product line).

The box is the usual sleeve around box with no lid. The 550 sits in a clear plastic carrier. Under the carrier is a little goodies collection: RAM Mount handlebar mount with a ball, etc. The ball attaches to a mount; the 550 clicks into place on the other side of the mount. There are two choices for powering the mount: a pigtail cable ending in a waterproof connector on one end and red and black wires on the other end (no fuse). The pigtail connects to a pigtail extending from the mount. They tie together with a watertight connector. When I connect them, I'll use some self-adhering tape to cover the connectors - belt and suspends thinking.

Obviously, for FJR folk, this is not the droid... mount you seek. A clutch or brake reservoir is the best call. BTDT with a previous bike. There's no issue with leaking.

Plan B for power is a standard micro connector (not Type C) USB cable. It's not a proprietary cable, just a USB cable. The port is on the back of the 550, the bottom edge. This connection makes no pretense of being even weather resistant. But it does give one way to connect to a PC or USB adapter in a power point. But a USB cable isn't a must, except to avoid doing battery duration testing.

The 550 can use a WiFi connection for direct conversation to TT HQ (I guess). The setup is mindlessly simple. Start the WiFi process, pick a router you like, and a password as needed, and that's it.

A BT link between the 550 and a phone is also possible. I haven't tried this yet. I need a BT link to my Sena 20S and phone, too. How this will work out is an open question, that has me a little worried.

With the first power up, 550 does a startup activity of some sort, and moves a "thermometer bar" across the bottom of the screen. There's a little tomtom riff (well, duh!) and the 550's awake. After that, there's a splash screen, tomtom riff, brief thermometer, and "ready for duty, sir!"

I did a couple of search for possible route destinations. I think the 550 got bored waiting for my fumble-finger type-ins. It came up with the right addresses justthatfast. The 660 was ...um... not so speedy.

AT this point I'm going to take the 550 for a drive, to pick up our BMW X3 that needed a new starter. At least this bill will be under $1K. Gotta love BMW... if you're a stock owner. As a car owner, not so much

 

[user 91838]

Hope it treats you better than my TT Rider2 treated me.

 

[RBEmerson]

After the drive... I'm still trying to find my way through 550. Parts are intuitive, parts are not, and few are disappointing compared to the 660.

Map scale is easy: two finger pinch or squeeze. How this will work out with gloves is an open question. The "you're this far on your trip" thermometer is basically "why?". Give me the ETA and distance to go.

The "just in map mode" doesn't show the next street name. Even in a scale that's fairly tight to the vehicle doesn't list all of the obvious intersecting roads. In fact, there's no "approaching Main St." at all.

It took a little effort to find the settings menu. Tap MENU on the screen and slide the list of options to the left. The gear in a circle is it.

I tried the "rotate the screen" trick. V. cool. The screen blanks briefly and shows the right orientation.

Speaking of orientation, it seems the map stays with "direction of travel up". If there's a north up display, I haven't met it.

There is no elevation info anywhere. Maybe knowing the elevation is "for fun" but I'll be the judge of whether I want it or not. Grumble, grumble...

There's a trip travel statistics and a today travel statistics. Tucked away is a total statistics since day 1. Why that supposed to be useful escapes me.

The screen presentation is sharp! But, uh oh, the screen is mirror glossy. Imagine the sun over a shoulder and shining on the screen. And, if things are right, into your eyes. Say what?

The mounts. I thought it was going to be less than rugged. Wrong! The 550 clicks into two pins in the mount and is then nailed down by a metal plate with a tab sticking out. While get locking the 550 in place, the 550 isn't going anywhere with a casual grab. Not gonna happen.

It's to early to give the 550 an overall grade. Despite the gripes and things I need to adapt to, the 550 is in no danger of going back where it came from.

 

[JamesW]

It is amazing to me where motorcycling has gone.

 

[SouthernCruizer]

Garmin leaves a lot to be desired, but in my opinion, it's still the best game in town. Wish they would up their game and get serious about providing a bug free quality navigation tool for us 2 wheelers.

 

[RBEmerson]

IMHO the problem isn't bugs. My 660 worked well, within limitations, most of the time I've had it. However, a number of things sent me elsewhere.

Foremost, Garmin's support is, to be kind, uneven. One support person makes a reasonable effort to answer a question. Another one says my computers broken and should go to "a tech" to be fixed. The particular problem was eventually corrected by Garmin, who took no ownership of the problem.

Navigation is also uneven. Left to its own route layout, it's no better or worse than any computer-driven routing. Using external routes from BaseCamp, it demonstrably ignores the routing.

I can think of other issues, but they're best left in the "why I left Garmin" thread.

 

[RBEmerson]

Random notes:

I'm racking up more time with the 550. For some reason, only the female voices in at least the English language subsets (British, Australian, New Zealand) give street names with distance and which way to turn. At least Lisa, the German female voice, only gives turns and distances. There are probably other examples.

The directions are surprisingly terse. "Main Street. Turn left in 500 feet". Yes, ma'am! Aye-aye, ma'am!

So far I haven't seen the situation where a road being followed makes a hard turn and the assumption is, even without a prompt, you'll be clever enough to find the correct route. Sometimes the continuation isn't obvious. For example, following I10 across the south side of Phoenix AZ to get to an address on the western edge of Phoenix, the instructions are to follow I10 to Truck I10/I17. Except I10 does some odd merges about 4-5 miles before I17 shows up and there's no "go this way" from the 660.

The 550 doesn't so much as beep when it figures out a new route after I turn off the existing route. One minute the magic blue line goes down this road, next minute (second!) it goes down the new road. A subtle "ding" would be nice. Ah well, better a wicked fast new route layout than an annoying "recalculating" and waiting 10 or more seconds before the 660 lets me see its new plan.

Which reminds me, the 550 is wicked fast. If there's any lag, I haven't seen it.

The keyboard is also wicked fast to respond. Tap a "key" and a character shows up almost immediately. And destination suggestions show up on the screen while still typing. A friend lives on Grouse Drive in Bath PA. While typing in his address, it's interesting to see matches for the house number, some hundreds of miles away. Getting to the street name, I had no idea how many Grouse Drives, Grouse Coves, and almost anything else with Grouse shows up until I add Bath. Then the location pops up justlikethat. Wicked fast.

The "keys" are going to be interesting with gloves on. OTOH, type-ins while rolling are about the same as texting while rolling (HD dude with phone in his left hand, thumb dancing around on the screen! Honest!). 'Nuff said.

The key layout has no great surprises. The layout is the standard QWERTY layout. There's a button for shifting to numbers, to special punctuation, and back to letters. Anyone who types regularly on a phone will be familiar with the way the keyboard works.

Tucked away in settings is a pair of sliders for day and night screen brightness. IIRC the 660 gives one level of brightness for day and night. Both change from day to night screen at local sunrise/set. The color palette for the night screen isn't my first choice: everything turns into greys. The 660 opts for a colored screen with very little white in it. I might be able to change the palette on the 550. Or not.

The more I use the 550, the more it trains me to use the 550 way of things. I'll look for ways to train it to RBE way of things. Who knows - maybe I'll win a fight or two while losing the overall battle.

 

[ktown]

I"m kinda late coming into this subject , I got email,2,asking if interested to upgrade to the 550. But I never cared for the TT Rider guess it was me and it giving me fits whenever I did try using. Now that they, TT, are telling me they won't be supporting it with map updates due to hardware limits.

Don't know about Samsung S9+ being waterproof? As in a x mount and rain shower the display kinda went bonkers on me? No harm but had to put it up.

 

[RBEmerson]

Reviving a very old thread...

After a lot of miles with the 550, it's better than any Garmin product in some regards, worse in some, and the same as Garmin when it comes to company support. 

First, the 550's routing is generally the same at the 660. The applies to Google Maps, for that matter. The good news is that, unlike the 660, it hasn't tried to send me down goat paths.

The UI is different, parts are better, parts are not. The problem with over-sensitive keys turned out to be an error in system settings. Problem solved. 

The destination search process (how do I get to the nearest Ikea - I haven't a clue about its address) can be ...um... weird. Results don't seem to be sorted by distance. Short and long distances seem to be mixed together. There's no "best guess" engine - make a small error in a place name and the place might as well not exist. There's no "maybe you mean?" capability. 

I complained about "where are the German voices?". They become available only when telling the 550 to operate in German. That is, "button text in English, voice in German - 'cause I want to try it that way" doesn't happen. Which makes sense. Silly me. 

Maybe I've gotten used to it, so I like it more, but I think much of the 660 UI is a little smoother.

The 550/phone app feels like a beta. Reconnecting to the phone (or vice versa) is slow, frustrating, and generally... very beta testing (alpha, maybe?). Aside from passing along current traffic and weather info, IMNSHO, the app is useless. But... the all time FAIL is the app is a battery burner. Even if the 550 is turned off and stored in the next state, the app will a) continue to run, and b) steal battery power and CPU cycles. The only "fix" is to uninstall it or keep the phone on a charger. You think I'm kidding... Going to Settings -> Apps -> MyDrive and attempting a "Force stop" is a waste of time. The app returns from the dead. Over and over. Is it clear I hate this thing? (For those with rooted android phones, Titanium Backup has a "freeze" function that seems to uninstall an app, but only hides it from the OS. Unfreeze the app and everything, including data, is back as if nothing happened. MyDrive can be frozen - yes!)

For some bizarre reason, while the GPS engine is capable of giving altitude or elevation data (any GPS engine can do this!), the 550 doesn't show the data. Anywhere. No way, no how.

Why is TT like Garmin when it comes to customer relations? Neither of them will admit to your existence, save as a bit of income. To be fair to Garmin, this is some hope of a response from "support" although my experience has been the response was meaningless (during protracted crashes with any Garmin app, such as Base Camp and Garmin Explorer) I got back "nothing wrong here, take your PC to a tech to be fixed". Magically 6-8 weeks later, after an update, everything worked again. Hmmm... 

Two different PC's, one with Win7, one with Win10, see the same crash? Not us, must be the PC. Sigh...

"Dear TT, why is there no elevation display in the 550?" Still hearing crickets... no "not us, you're just riding in Kansas", no "gosh, we forgot to do that, look for an update to cover that". Crickets, just crickets. The user forum reports that same thing, over and over - crickets, just crickets. If TT has talked to anyone, I don't recall hearing about it.

So... I went back and revived my 660. It's still the same ol' 660 I knew of old. For better or worse. I use the 550 regularly in the car as well as on the FJR. I put the 660 back in the corner I found it in (for no obvious reason, the screen blinks and blanks on occasion). But a perfect wedding with the 550 this isn't. 

PS Why is it the 660 voice is 100% loud or silent? For the same reason the 550 does the same thing. It hinges on the bluetooth connection protocol needed for a simple GPS connection. There is no volume control under this protocol. None. Don't ask. Ain't happ'nin'. Or... it's not Garmin/TT's fault. 

 

[Bounce]

Does it support city-to-city searching/routing?

I have an off-brand GPS that has some things I like better than and some less than my Garmin. I truly hate how Garmin orphans customers far too regularly and has been systematically removing features that rider (me) can use to make them simpler for "the average consumer". One of those differences was the loss of city-to-city routing (it demands an address for a destination).

 

[RBEmerson]

AFAIK, I can't say "take me from Pigeon Forge to Brantley". However, I can put in "Brantley" and add "Pgeon Forge" as a waypoint. On arrival at Pigeon Forge... You can guess the rest. 

Finding a destination can be frustrating, though. I want to go to a store on a far distant shore; if I don't put in exactly the right name... Nada. IIRC correctly not every Trader Joe's comes up because the names aren't consistent. Comparing routing with Waze/Maps with the 550 can be a headscratcher. 

I finally figured out why the Bluetooth audio is always LOUD. It's not the 550's fault (ditto for Garmin). The GPS - headset connection uses a "dumb" protocol that does not include volume control. Using the protocol that does support volume control is possible but... the GPS assumes control over the audio from the phone. AFAIK, tinkering with the order of who gets turned on first doesn't fix it. The only hope is to change the priority of which source has priority over the other. AFAIK most headsets don't support that. Even if they do, with tunes running, the GPS will never break in to give its directions, etc. In short, it's link or no link.

If support for altitude has been added, I haven't seen it.

 

[SouthernCruizer]

AFAIK, I can't say "take me from Pigeon Forge to Brantley". However, I can put in "Brantley" and add "Pgeon Forge" as a waypoint. On arrival at Pigeon Forge... You can guess the rest. 

Finding a destination can be frustrating, though. I want to go to a store on a far distant shore; if I don't put in exactly the right name... Nada. IIRC correctly not every Trader Joe's comes up because the names aren't consistent. Comparing routing with Waze/Maps with the 550 can be a headscratcher. 

I finally figured out why the Bluetooth audio is always LOUD. It's not the 550's fault (ditto for Garmin). The GPS - headset connection uses a "dumb" protocol that does not include volume control. Using the protocol that does support volume control is possible but... the GPS assumes control over the audio from the phone. AFAIK, tinkering with the order of who gets turned on first doesn't fix it. The only hope is to change the priority of which source has priority over the other. AFAIK most headsets don't support that. Even if they do, with tunes running, the GPS will never break in to give its directions, etc. In short, it's link or no link.

If support for altitude has been added, I haven't seen it.

I have a Garmin 665 and the TT 550. Not sure what you meant about the bluetooth always loud on the Gramin...if your 660 is like my 665, there are settings for music and navigation seperately...and in fact, the power button , when pressed quickly, brings up that menu. On the other hand, the TT 550 has no such function, which pisses me off. I have to use the volum controls on the headset, which is not as convient as touching the GPS. 

 

[RossKean]

Garmin has just announced a new contender.  Zumo XT.  I have a Zumo 665 and it has been a disappointment - slow, dim screen, insufficient battery power and insufficient map storage room.  I was thinking about looking at the TomTom but will consider this.  Around $500 USD.

https://buy.garmin.com/en-US/US/p/679804

Looks like there are some possibilities with this one.  I will wait and see what the early reviews say...