'Leap year' bug drives TomTom satnav users up the wall TomTom's satnavs have been caught out by a "leap year bug" this week which has caused the company's GPS receivers to suddenly stop working, driving users crazy. The company coughed to the flaw this morning, posting a public confession and telling satnav owners that an update may be necessary to fix the problem. "Since …
Yes, perfect sense. When else would you experience a leap year bug other than the 31st March?
Did they think there was no 31st March in a leap year? I vote any bugs uncovered between now and the end of year be designated leap year bugs. Sounds much better than "we didn't test it properly"
Really, but you state that it's a software problem, and the software is exactly the same across all models is it not (I have a hacked £50 satnav running TomTom and as far as I can tell, it's the same software as TomTom models).
If TomTom have a testing and/or QA department I can only imagine that their capabilities match those of untrained monkeys; TomTom is in a permanent state of fail with it's products, earlier this year the Live Traffic (subscription) service wouldn't work for at least a couple of weeks after a major software update (the one where they forced users to stop caring about their privacy unless you didn't want to use some of the device functions you have purchased) which would seem to be a basic function to test during a release...will the device standard functions work!
In the realms of time taken with a SatNav device (admittedly not a pre-occupation in life but it is a device that is supposed to make life easier else why bother) I have spent far too much getting it to just work or calling TomTom and telling them to get it to work; if they get a fix for this one in the next couple of days it will be a surprise compared to their usual slow approach, I'm sure they don't want to set a precedent of being competent.
Wish I had my old Navman again, it was basic but at least it just worked...
I've just powered-on my TomTom One and the time is one hour out. Manually changed the time and it picked up the sats fine. I don't know if that will work for all TomToms, or even for mine next time I power it on.
TomTom join Apple in the list of companies who cannot test leap year and/or summer time changes.
So it didn't notice 29th February until more than a month after? That's some serious leap year bug.
@AndrueC - Yes, Greg has a lot to answer for! I seem to remember reading somewhere that at some point people were using a 30-day month X 12 months calendar, and then spend the extra 5 days in hardcore feasting to celebrate the new year. Surely by the end of the 5 days the extra quarter day would get lost in hangoverland, and presto! no leap year problem!
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TomTom need to be careful - by co-incidence I did an update on the 31st (because they'd been telling me to do one by email a couple of times). I then found that my device could no longer search by postcode. After an approximated journey or two, I did some searching and found the fix - in so doing, finding that my device seems to think I'm either in the UK or in Vatican City, and that it had previously been able to locate postcodes in Luxemburg, but not the UK (or Vatican City, for that matter).
In short, whatever the hell just got onto my device, it sure ain't clean and tidy. If they don't start making this stuff work properly they'll go the same way as Nokia. My Android phone is nearly as good as a TomTom (albeit only when there's 3G signal). It's only a matter of time before Android (or IOS) beats them hands-down.
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