TomTom GO Live 1535M review

The TomTom GO Live 1535M has the distinction of being the first portable navigation device (PND) to feature connected apps. The 1535M features a trio of apps that, via the Live Services data connection and accessed under the Live Services icon on the Home screen, allow the user to search Yelp, Trip Advisor, and Expedia for points of interest (or POIs) for navigation. In addition to giving the user access to a larger, more up-to-date database of POIs, searching the cloud with the help of Yelp, Expedia, Trip Advisor, and even Google Local Search (which has been a part of TomTom Live since its inception) also give the user access to user generated and, in the case of Expedia, professional reviews. Each result returned when searching with one of these connected sources is accompanied by a rating to help sort the gems from the junk.

There's also Twitter integration that allows users to text their destination and ETA while driving. Before you groan, you'll soon learn that this actually turned out to be one of the best bits of app integration the TomTom has to offer.

Like the Live Services-enabled devices that preceded it, the TomTom GO Live 1535M also features TomTom's HD Traffic service, which is easily one of the best and most coverage complete traffic data services on the market. There's also fuel price quotes, which is remarkably well integrated into the rest of TomTom's OS, making appearances on the trip summary page and automatically populating the fuel category of the POI search with local prices for regular and premium gasoline, as well as diesel. There are also speed camera alerts that sound an audible chime when the drive approaches an intersection with a red-light camera or a stretch for road monitored by a speed camera.

Searching via apps: Better or worse?
I was in the mood for ice cream at the beginning of my testing, so I decided to browse Yelp's database of destinations for a highly rated parlor near my current location. POIs can also be searched in proximity to the user's preset Home address, near the destination of the current route (if one was in progress), or in a city of their choosing. Available destinations are organized into coarse categories such as Restaurants, Nightlife, Arts & Entertainment, and Hotels & Travel, so I selected the Restaurants heading and was immediately presented with the five closest restaurants in Yelp's database. Here's where things start getting shaky. Unfortunately, none of the restaurants listed was an ice cream parlor, and TomTom's Yelp integration doesn't offer more granular categorization than its 22 top level categories. So there's no way to specify that you want, for example, an Italian restaurant and not a sushi bar. Even then, some of these top-level categories can be redundant--for example, searching "Food" returns largely the same results as "Restaurants." This is disappointing, as Yelp's somewhat obsessive categorization and subcategorization of the types of businesses in its database is part of what makes the service so useful on the Web and on a smartphone.

Browsing POIs via Yelp only features about 22 top-level categories, but no way to separate, for example, Italian restaurants from sushi bars.

There is a way around all of this categorization rigmarole and that's with the Search by Name function. Typically, using Search by Name with the built-in and locally stored POI database is only really useful if you already know where you're going or for destinations with self-explanatory names, such as Luigi's Italian Restaurant. However, using Search by Name in tandem with one of the connected search engines also takes into account the expanded data for each POI. So, for the purposes of my search, Smitten Ice Cream would show up in a search for "ice cream" but then so should the more highly rated Bi-Rite Creamery, despite not having the exact search term in its title.

However, there are a few issues with Search by Name. First, hitting the Search button on the Results screen will only filter the visible POIs (as opposed to requerying the Web service). And since selecting any category automatically takes you to a Results screen, the only way to cast a broad search net is to initiate the Search by Name before selecting a category. Of course, this now means that a search for The Fillmore concert hall will also return the dozens of unrelated restaurants, barbershops, and places of worship that are also on Filmore Street. Additionally, search didn't seem to like certain terms. In particular, every search I ran for the term "ice cream" was met with an error message proclaiming that "Something went wrong" and that I should "Please try again later." It would seem that the TomTom GO Live 1535M was determined to keep me from my dairy dessert.

Yelp and Trip Advisor reviews can be browsed from the 1535M's interface.

Eventually, I just keyed "Bi-Rite" into the search box and learned that TomTom's search engine also places a higher emphasis on proximity than on search-term accuracy when Smitten Ice Cream was listed as the first search result, while the Bi-Rite Creamery sat about 4 pages down in the 17th position. The order of the results changes depending on where you are when initiating the search. I understand why this happens, but like everything related to the 1535M's connected search, it's a bit odd and counterintuitive.

With the four-star-rated Bi-Rite Creamery located and ice cream on the horizon, I tapped the entry and was taken to a destination details page that showed a preview of the POI's position on the map, its straight-line distance from my current location, and shortcuts to initiate a call, search for parking nearby, and Show Info, which displays a selection of Yelp's user generated reviews.

Connected services are integrated into the local database search, but not each others'.