4. Getting Connected - Bravo!

• Go 700 GPS (Vehicle,...
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  • $99.00
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  • $195.20

My very real threat to make Part II of the Go 700 story a quick and dirty forget-it-folks piece seems to have lit a fire under TomTom. After but a little more waiting, I was put in touch with a product support person in Boston, Mass. USA, not Amsterdam, Holland. Bravo! She and I went through the whole process on the phone and I still couldn't connect to the traffic information server on either my V557 or on the loaner Razr V3.

I couldn't get either the V557 or Razr V3 to work with the TomTom Go 700 GPS.

My support person hypothesized that there could be a problem with the traffic information server itself. Apparently it wasn't possible to reliably connect to the server when TomTom's techies were performing maintenance on it. She said she was going to report that to the Plus product manager. We stayed on the line and she tried a connection on her side once she was sure maintenance had been completed. She connected right away. I still couldn't connect.

My support rep then said she needed to talk to the mother ship in Holland. Next day she left a message saying that the no-service-during-maintenance problem had been solved. She also said that I should try to connect again and mentioned something about diddling with the Bluetooth history on my phones. She promised to lead me through that short task, if I couldn't connect without making any changes.

I still was unable to connect to the traffic information server. So I fiddled with my phone, the "unsupported" Motorola V557 not the Razr V3 loaner, and bingo, things started happening. When I tried to connect to the traffic information server I wasn't greeted by a field of red and an error message. Instead, I connected to the server and was led through a full blown connect scenario. I was asked what country I was in and given a list of phones to choose from. The list included the V557. It had been so long since my original contact with TomTom that the V557 had been tested and added to the list of supported phones.

I have no idea what happened to my phone and its TomTom pairing information. However, after finally getting the V557 straightened out I was able to download traffic information and check out some of the other TomTom Plus services. Before moving on to these, here's what I did to fix the phone problem on my Motorola V557.

Settings > Connection > Bluetooth Link > Device History > TomTom Go 700 > Edit > Change > Delete

With the TomTom Go 700 pairing profile deleted, I was able to re-pair both the V557 and the Razr V3 with the Go 700 and all worked fine. Don't ask me why this fixed the problem, but the V557 and the Razr V3 weren't allowing Internet data access under the original pairings.

I have some serious concerns about my experience with TomTom's US support group and all of the delays in getting answers to my questions. All of this doesn't speak well for the company's ability to help a customer is distress. Because so much of my experience with the Go 700 as a GPS was so positive and required no help from customer support I'm not going to ding TomTom too much here. I do urge them to get their act together on all of this. They should at least improve the depth of their online FAQs to focus on questions and answers relating to GPS-to-phone connectivity.