Last fall this came out saying that tomtom was leaving the consumer GPS market.

RIP, TomTom GPS Consumer Hardware | TechnoBuffalo

That doesn't surprise me one bit. The combination of smartphones with turn-by-turn sat-nav and cars with it built in must mean the market for something suctioned onto your windscreen is getting smaller, let alone the tiny motorbike market. The cost of tooling up for new hardware means the margins are always going to be small per unit. This probably goes some way to explain why a bike sat-nav costs several hundred pounds whereas an in, car can be bought for £49.99.

BUT the software market will remain, car manufacturers like to offer sat-nav, it's still seen as a premium accessory so TomTom have wisely decided to let the manufacturers mess around with all the expensive messy wires and stuff and focus on providing software which has no tooling costs and no expensive manufacturing plant, just a few computer geeks in a room and a decent coffee machine.

TomTom have long been offering software on smartphone, stretching right back to the early Windows phones of ten years ago which needed an external bluetooth GPS receiver ahmed no doubt will continue to do so. Yes, Google Navigation does everything a TomTom can, yes it can be updated OTA daily if need be, but have you noticed how cellphone operators are beginning to cap data, or charge extra for premium data limits? If you are a daily sat-nav user streaming map data to your phone throughout the day you'll pay dearly for the privilege, and that's before you even think about travelling abroad where it could cost as much as the rest of your trip put together. So TomTom can come in and offer offline mapping at a price point of say £25, which out competes the cheap Chinese GPS units and the car manufacturers' maps for countries other than that in which the car was purchased, with a recognised market-leading name, and still make a tidy profit.

As for bikers, well we're such a small market we'll just have to put up with what we're given. Or buy Garmin.

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I am very happy with Tomtom now.
My almost five year old Rider 2th edition had a problem and I had to send it back to Tomtom and now they have send me a brand new Rider !

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Jan Krijtenburg

My bikes are a Honda GoldWing GL1200 and a BMW R1200GS

My personal homepage with trip reports: https://www.krijtenburg.nl/
YouTube channel (that I do together with one of my sons): motormobilist.nl