Also, do you need the TomTom cradle because you find the GPS built into the iPhone to be too weak?

The GPS built into the iPhone is definitely too weak; it won't do turn by turn navigation. It usually registers your position to be about a block behind where you actually are.

Clearly a wheel-based remote unit is ideal for interacting with a dash mounted nav/music/phone system.

Also, do you need the TomTom cradle because you find the GPS built into the iPhone to be too weak?

Fair enough. The Android navigation app definitely is a navigation app. It's at least on par with other GPS units I've used, and has both voice prompting and voice recognition. (I think the VR is piped back to Google HQ, though.)

Hmmm this was looking good until I found that the iPhone only lets you play or pause over AVRCP. Missing the skip track function I was looking for.

So, I went for the TomTom app and matching TomTom cradle kit as they have just release a proclip that allows a permanent mounting solution.

I've used it over the past couple of days for the first time for some serious driving and have been quite impressed. It's certainly nice to have everything in one tidy package that I take everywhere with me.

I am surprised however that 10 years after the empeg that car integration of technology is so bad. There are a few annoying things about this combination, some I feel are down to TomTom and others seem to be just the nature of the iPhone itself. One annoying thing is that if you are listening to music via the dock and you pull up and switch the ignition off the music continues to play though the internal iPhone speaker. Other things are TomTom problems, like not having the track skip buttons on screen the whole time, you can see any track info either and the quality seems somewhat worse than via the headphone jack.

I took a call today while using TomTom, the handsfree is just about ok, barely. It's too quiet in the car, but I am too loud to the caller. They did comment that even though my voice was a bit thin and swarky they couldn't hear any road noise and could hear me just fine, just too loudly. The volume control seems to work both things at the same time, annoyingly. The worst thing is the app quits to take the call. I knew it was going to do this, and I look forward to Apple allowing multitasking sometime in the future, or making taking a call like playing music, something that can continue in the background.

I also hope that bluetooth remotes are supported sometime soon, it would be a very neat solution if it did.

Cheers

Cris.

...another TomTom related problem is the volume on the cradle. It doesn't remember the last volume setting, so when you power it down, or even just remove the iPhone the next time it is back to near minimum volume. annoying.

I have tried the TomTom app both with and without the cradle for navigation and the GPS in the cradle is clearly much better than the one built in the iPhone. It gets a lock amazingly quickly and never lost it once during the few hundred miles I did yesterday. The standard GPS jumps about a bit and seems to lag behind causing the voice prompts to be given quite late on some occasions. So I need the TomTom cradle for GPS and the mounting solution, and the parrot for just about everything else!

[quote=hybrid8]It doesn't have to be on the steering wheel, just a button to skip tracks without having to touch the phone and take it out of sleep would be great. If TomTom did that I'd already have one I think.