New Cheaper Tom Tom Rider

[gbelleville]

I could not find any posts about this unit in the forum....does anyone have one of these yet? At that price, it looks like a slam dunk.

https://www.roadrunner.travel/2014/05/16/new-tomtom-rider-getting-way-less/

 

[Allen_C]

I have one and used it to get to SEOR and tech day in Owosso. It works well, is water right (except for possibly drowning it in more than 3'of water), comes with a strong mount with a Ram ball and hardware to install on the mounting bracket, quick release wiring is included, has daytime and nighttime color modes, does fairly quick recalculations, and has the curvy road routing which I have not yet tried, but also includes the Tyre program to plan routes on your laptop or import gpx files then save then to the TomTom.

The importing gpx files and saving is the only function I've had trouble with. Everything seemed to work when I did this with the Ramble routes but the TomTom only had the first 80 or so miles of the 300+ mile routes. Tyre converted them properly, after I reduced the # of waypoints to 48 or less per itinerary, the TomTom displayed the text version completely, but the map stopped after about 80 miles. Not sure why; if this was just a glitch in converting these files but I will work on converting others to determine then provide feedback to TomTom, if needed.

 

[MrZappo]

I have one, it works fine. Tyre software is great ... If you are going to do routes with it, you should use the roads themselves as your waypoints as opposed to the cities or destinations as the unit itself might calculate the routes slightly differently than the tire software did. The tyre software used the google maps routing algorithm. The tomtom is sometimes a little different ...

You can get good by using the roads you want to ride as the waypoints thereby not giving it a choice about how to get you from point to point ...

 

[Rambler]

I'm getting a new version Rider in a few days.

A friend sold his Honda Shadow and has sent it across to 'look after and use' till he gets his new set of wheels, probably 2 months out.

 

[Allen_C]

I'm getting a new version Rider in a few days. A friend sold his Honda Shadow and has sent it across to 'look after and use' till he gets his new set of wheels, probably 2 months out.

The new one is v5 or the 2014 version. It can be found for as low as $330.

 

[bigjohnsd]

I have the V5 and have put about 500 miles on it. Have played with Tyre but not to any great extent.

It connects to my phone (Android) and my Scala G9.

Functionality is good, operation with gloves is good, curvy roads seems to work and made good choices in the Black Hills.

If you intentionally deviate from the route it automatically recalculates.

I like the free map updates forever feature.

When you get one the first thing you need to do is register and then DOWNLOAD the latest software update. Many folks have written nasty reviews and the gist of their review is that they did not follow the startup instructions and did not download and priont the latest manual or book.

As we used to say in the Navy RTFB, that's why they spent the money to write it!

 

[Just Krusen]

I wrote the following back in September. I had a Tom Tom for about 2 weeks and sent it back and bought a Zumo 390.

========================

I'm sending my TT back tomorrow also. Can't beat the no cost 30 day trial.

Hell the TT has a compass that has east and west wrong. The processor is much slower than any Garmin I have ever used and I've had many models since 1990 when I started using them on my boat. The worst thing was that it can't even follow the simple route I programmed for Saturdays ride. In the middle of the ride I could not get it to finish the route for the last 50 miles. It kept sending me back to the stating point no matter what I told it. Coming from a Garmin I found the menu structure to complicated. Way too many steps just to load a route. I think it was 10 button pushes to load the route and another 5 just to cancel it. While following the route I created(before it caused a problem) I hit the gas station quick link button and TT locked up and shut the unit off. I restarted and tried again only to get the same results. At the gas station i tried it again and it worked fine, but who cares I'm already here. At lunch we were only 3 miles from our destination but no matter what I did the TT took me back to the start of the route and back to where I was, 190 miles. Good thing I'm not stupid enough to follow it. On the way home I just hit the home button and the route worked OK. It's idea of the fastest way home and mine were slightly different but nothing worth griping about. I did like the fact that roads were named with both route number and name. I never liked Garmins using name only for major routes.

Not sure what I'm going with next. I'm going to check with Garmin to see if they still refurbish the 550. If so I might go that route along with a new cradle as that should get me through a couple of more years. It would be well worth a couple hundred bucks to me. If not I'll be looking at the 660 and new 390 very soon.

Ed Kruse (aka Speed Nut)
Naples, FL
GWRRA #124374
Chapter FL2-G
2013 Yamaha FJR 1300A
"Just Kruse'n"

https://gl1800riders.com/forums/showthread.php?361305-Garmin-Zumo-GPS-recommendation%28s%29

 

[Allen_C]

Ed, your experience was very different than mine. Did you update maps and the system after you took the unit out of the box? I was surprised that it wanted (and I allowed it) to do all the updates before trying to use it.

Also, which version did you have? I think the v5 did not get realised until Feb of this year.

 

[MrZappo]

I wrote the following back in September. I had a Tom Tom for about 2 weeks and sent it back and bought a Zumo 390.========================

I'm sending my TT back tomorrow also. Can't beat the no cost 30 day trial.

Hell the TT has a compass that has east and west wrong. The processor is much slower than any Garmin I have ever used and I've had many models since 1990 when I started using them on my boat. The worst thing was that it can't even follow the simple route I programmed for Saturdays ride. In the middle of the ride I could not get it to finish the route for the last 50 miles. It kept sending me back to the stating point no matter what I told it. Coming from a Garmin I found the menu structure to complicated. Way too many steps just to load a route. I think it was 10 button pushes to load the route and another 5 just to cancel it. While following the route I created(before it caused a problem) I hit the gas station quick link button and TT locked up and shut the unit off. I restarted and tried again only to get the same results. At the gas station i tried it again and it worked fine, but who cares I'm already here. At lunch we were only 3 miles from our destination but no matter what I did the TT took me back to the start of the route and back to where I was, 190 miles. Good thing I'm not stupid enough to follow it. On the way home I just hit the home button and the route worked OK. It's idea of the fastest way home and mine were slightly different but nothing worth griping about. I did like the fact that roads were named with both route number and name. I never liked Garmins using name only for major routes.

Not sure what I'm going with next. I'm going to check with Garmin to see if they still refurbish the 550. If so I might go that route along with a new cradle as that should get me through a couple of more years. It would be well worth a couple hundred bucks to me. If not I'll be looking at the 660 and new 390 very soon.

Ed Kruse (aka Speed Nut)

Naples, FL

GWRRA #124374

Chapter FL2-G

2013 Yamaha FJR 1300A

"Just Kruse'n"

https://gl1800riders.com/forums/showthread.php?361305-Garmin-Zumo-GPS-recommendation%28s%29

This may be the case but this has not been my experience at all ...

If it was as bad as you are saying, then you either had a bad unit or didn't update the software ... No question about this because mine does none of the things that yours did ...

In any event, as I said earlier, it is less refined than the garmin and so on ... It does not speak street names for example ... It just says "left turn in 500 feet" etc etc ...

For half the price it does most of the things I want and it is missing a few things ... For instance, it does have bluetooth to my helmet speakers but not live traffic ... I wish it had live traffic ... But, it does have lifetime maps and so on ...

So, there are some trade offs. It is probably not as "nice" as the $800 Garmins (The screen is a tad smaller)... But, as I was looking at it, it has not failed to get me to a destination yet, the routes work if you do them right ... the map looks ok but not super hi res ... It is waterproof and comes with a nice mount ...

For half the price, it got me the items I cant live without and allowed me to be the kind of rider that uses it maybe 10 times per year on trips etc ...

If I was retired and riding all the time on long rides to new and exotic places maybe I would spring for the garmin ... (Probably not but maybe) ...

As I said, It gets me to where I am going, is waterproof, has bluetooth and lifetime maps ...

And as a bonus, it is only normally overpriced as opposed to ridiculously overpriced(Garmin) compared to a car unit ...

 

[wheatonFJR]

I rode with Allen at the SE Ohio Ramble. Allen was forthright in some of its shortcomings, but it seems like I could work with it. I'm a map guy that has only had a used Garmin 2720 for a few years, I like the Garmin but I need new maps. My wife bought a TT for the car a few years ago and it works pretty good. I think I will try the TT Rider and see if I can work around the waypoint limitations. New Garmins are just too damn expensive, and I'd like the new gps for our new SC AOR.

 

[SCOTTIE]

I had a TomTom for about 3 days. My first GPS was a TomTom One back in the day and after I tried a Garmin car GPS I was hooked, but when the new Rider came out with a $299 price (on sale at Amazon !!) I jumped at it. I updated it, configured it, but just couldn't get it to work "like a Garmin". I sent it back and with the $300 I bought a second hand 550 with lifetime maps and a touratech mount from and inmate on ADVRider and haven't looked back.

I used my car gps (Garmin 1490 LMT) in a Ram Aquabox mounted to the handlebars of my FZ6 for the longest, but eventually with allthe vibrations etc the power connector failed.

I fail to see how Garmin can make a damn good car GPS for $200, but charge $800 for the 590LM. Does it really cost that amount of money to make a GPS waterproof and vibration proof?

 

[NightShine]

I've had a TomTom GPS since they were first offered on the American market some years back, and I'm still using one, but they are not without their issues. As you might imagine, I must like them to have stuck with them. I use Garmin GPS units in my autos.

Like many units the TomTom Rider's screen can be difficult to read in direct sunlight. This seems to be more a shortcoming of LED technology (e.g.: reading a Kindle versus an iPad on the beach), although some manufacturer's implementations are better than others.

None of the TomTom Riders show an elevation value, even on the GPS satellite tracking page. What's with that?

TomTom Rider (original one):

Good unit that took me all across the country. Very reliable, but had its shortcomings. The achilles heal of this unit was the cradle mount. A design flaw allowed vibration to eventually wear away at the contact points on the back of the unit, preventing the unit from charging on the bike. Left me with a squirrelly GPS on one long distance trip. Found out then that it had various "power saving" modes.

TomTom Rider 2:

TomTom customer support has been way less than helpful at times. I don't know if they've improved or not over the years, but I eventually bought the revised model that corrected the defective cradle design. After a couple of years, I noticed that their more recent map updates seemed to be "a couple of hundred yards off" on where some addresses "resided" in some areas, giving me a wrong "last turn" on directions to a hotel or such. Accurate map data is critical in any GPS.

TomTom Rider 2013 (V5):

Came into some extra cash a while ago, and bought the latest model. Just because. Like the larger screen, winding roads, bigger "on/off" button, and USB charging feature. Overall, I really like this TomTom unit.

It has it's nits. I don't like the much smaller compass you can set to appear on the screen, it's much smaller than the Rider 2 and unreadable. And there have been a couple of routing snafus, as mentioned below, and there is no Mac-based software such as the PC-only Tyre software that TomTom touts.

Several years ago, several riders from the west heading toward Golden, CO reported that their GPS units sent them forever around in circles while passing through one particular town on the way to that NAFO event. This was reported using Garmen, TomTom or whatever model GPS units. Did I mention that accurate mapping databases and mapping algorithms are essential?

Now in the past several months, this latest TomTom Rider model has twice sent me in circular directions on some of the goat trails in western Marin county here in the Bay Area, forever recalculating, and proposing to send me backtracking back and forth. I can certainly see that if you lived in an area where these mapping snafus were common place, it would be a big downer. And yes, I've kept up-to-date with the unit's software and maps.

But I would buy this unit again.

 

[MrZappo]

.
I fail to see how Garmin can make a damn good car GPS for $200, but charge $800 for the 590LM. Does it really cost that amount of money to make a GPS waterproof and vibration proof?

Of course not. It costs a "little" more to do those things ...

They are screwing us ...

Garmin is famous for this ... Get a seemingly captive audience, make the GPS waterproof and Vibration proof, REMOVE features that were ALREADY in the car GPS units (3.5 inch audio jack, Bluetooth, routes (That is a big one) etc etc etc ... ) so that the car units will work for a motorcycle but are just too painful to use for one reason or another (pick your personal pain point).

Then, add those features BACK into the motorcycle units (Some are simply disabled software subroutines) and charge $800 for it ...

And for this reason I HAD to try the TOMTOM to see if I could get it to work ... For me it was more about giving garmin the finger than saving the money ...

And as I found out, I did make it work. It ain't perfect but it is plenty workable and every time I look down at it, I feel like I'm sneaking around behind dads back .... I love it ..

 

[Just Krusen]

I had the V5 with the winding road feature, probably one of the first ones out I'm guessing. Yes I did all the updates and spent about a week messing with it before putting it on the bike. I wanted it to work for me but it just would not work right with the custom routes I created. I might have just got a bad one. Like I said, even the compass needle pointed in the wrong direction. That alone had me concerned. I did give it a fair trial but no go. My friends even spent some time with it and also found it's interface hard to navigate.

I am happy that others have had a better experience with TT.

 

[dudeckp]

Trying the V5 myself soon, since two buddies think the Rider line is best of breed for M/C's. That said this will be my first NON-Garmin product (Aviation, USB pucks & GPS watch.) I'll be very candid with my opinions, once they've been formed.

 

[dudeckp]

eBay seller backed out saying item was damaged while packing. Just bought from better known source (for $30 more)

Should arrive this weekend... he said with baited breath.

 

[gbelleville]

dudeckp Any update on the unit?

 

[timk]

I had a TomTom1 and the thing I liked best was it really had the volume,I could hear it at slab speeds when it was velcroed to te top of a tall tankbag. Have a Garmin now.

 

[bigjohnsd]

Still loving my V5 (2013) Rider. No problems of note. Just updated my maps for free again!