Battery power for TT700

[groucho]

How long does the battery last for on the Tom Tom Go 700 between re-charges?

[b2tus]

Reckon on no more than a couple of hours.

[off_again]

Not the same thing I know, but a friend has a 300 and that one lasted close to 6 hours.. which I was very impressed by. Ok, the screen contrast was turned down to make it last longer, but either way that was rather good. Is the BT stuff in a 700 that bad on power in comparison?

I dont know, but interested to know...

[steve_D]

b2tus said:

Reckon on no more than a couple of hours.

Not had mine long enough to give an actual figure but it's very much longer than 2 hours including running bluetooth.

Steve

[groucho]

steve_D said:

b2tus said: Reckon on no more than a couple of hours. Not had mine long enough to give an actual figure but it's very much longer than 2 hours including running bluetooth. Steve

How much longer? One, two hours?

[steve_D]

I'll charge it and run it down tommorow.

Steve

Edit...another forum is indicating 5 hours.

>> Edited by steve_D on Tuesday 10th January 21:33

[steve_d]

From fully charged it ran for 5 hours 10 minutes sitting on my desk.
No bluetooth connection but searching for satellites.

Steve

[b2tus]

The 2 hours was with full screen brightness, bluetooth for hands free phone and voice commands. Battery warning went off around 2 hours.
To be fair, it was in the Italian Dolomites last Christmas and the unit had been locked in the boot of the car overnight at temperature of down to -15 C so in warmer climes, you should expect a good percentage more.

[groucho]

Cheers guys, just wondered.

[bad company]

I have been thinking of buying a TT 700 and had assumed that it would connect to the car’s power supply via the ciggy lighter.

I also thought that I could download the speed camera locations at some extra cost – does anybody know how much and how difficult it is to programme this in. I currently use an Origin which is updated weekly with new camera sites – Can I expect this standard of service from TT??

Finally has anybody actually used the BlueTooth telephone function?

[chris_n]

A few comments based on my Tom Tom experience (albeit a 500) ...

bad company said:

I have been thinking of buying a TT 700 and had assumed that it would connect to the car’s power supply via the ciggy lighter.

Yes it does plug into the ciggy lighter though for quick journeys I often just stick it in the car let it run of the internal rechargable battery without plugging in. It's good for a couple of hours or so like this.

bad company said:

I also thought that I could download the speed camera locations at some extra cost – does anybody know how much and how difficult it is to programme this in. I currently use an Origin which is updated weekly with new camera sites – Can I expect this standard of service from TT??

First download from TomTom site is free. Thereafter an annual subscription is about £50 quid a year IIRC. They claim the database is updated often but I'm not sure what that means in reality. The download is pretty easy - connect the TomTom to your PC via USB, dowload a zip file from their web site to your PC, unzip it, then drop the files into the right folder on the TomTom (which just looks like an external drive).

You can however download a database of camera locations from the internet for free and apparently this works fine. The TomTom website even acknowledges this and the only reason they seem to be able to give as to why you should pay them is that they "work very hard with the most reliable sources to create the best possible database". Not particularly convincing so I'm planning to go the free route when I need updates.

bad company said:

Finally has anybody actually used the BlueTooth telephone function?

Yes, it works fine, its very easy to set up a BlueTooth pairing and then use as a handsfree. If you have a very noisy car you might want consider the optional external mic.

The one area I have had trouble is getting the TomTom to use my mobile to get a GPRS connection to the web in order to pick up traffic info (this is how it gets the data). At this stage I'm not sure this is a problem with the TomTom settings or my mobile service provider. It seems if the TomTom's auto connect function doesn't work first time (and for the two different phones/networks I have tried it with it hasn't), then it's pretty hard to set up correctly.

HTH
Chris