» Special
About POI's, speed camera's, icons en .ov2
Part 1 - Standard POI functionality
By Bart Wijnen & Archeon
The GO gets shipped with fifty-nine categories of Points Of Interest. You can use those to navigate to a certain destination without knowing the exact address. Of course, for this to work the destination has to be one of the pre-defined POI's.
Eg. you are in Belgium, and you want to find the embassy of your country. In the main menu, tap "navigate to...", followed by "Point of Interest". Then choose the POI category (in this case "embassy"). You can scroll until you reach the "embassy" category, or you can just tap "E", which will make the TTG immediately jump to all the categories starting with "E". You'll notice that "embassy" is the first category on the screen. Select it by tapping it. You'll then get a list of all the Embassies that exist on your selected detail map. The detail map is the map of the country that you have loaded. In this specific example this will be the "Benelux" map, because we are in Belgium. As you probably know by now, when using the TTG you have to select the detail map of the country you're in.
Now, to find the exact embassy you need, you can scroll down until you reach it, OR you can tap on the icon in the bottom left-hand corner which will show a keyboard layout on the screen. On that keyboard you can then enter a search string. Eg. if you want the British embassy, just type: "British". Usually you won't even have to type in the whole word because TTG searches intelligently and will eliminate all the choices that become invalid as you type. In the example of the British embassy, typing "Br" is already sufficient. Select your choice by tapping it, and TTG will start planning a route. This is a simple example of how you can navigate to a Point of Interest. There are other ways too, but those are a bit more complicated.
Cash dispenser
Eg. You are in an unknown place and you want to find a cash dispenser. One option is to look around or asking a local person. Another option is letting TTG do all the work.
Go to the main menu. Tap "change preferences". Go to the second preferences menu. Tap "maintain POI". In the following screen, tap "enable/disable POI". Then you'll get a list of categories. Scroll down and select "cash dispenser". Cash dispenser will get checked. Tap "done". Now you can drive around and all cash dispensers will show up on your screen, by means of the little cash dispenser icon. This is of course possible for all the other available POI categories also. The biggest downside is that selecting a lot of POI categories will quickly congest your map display.
Firmware version 4.40
Since firmware version 4.40 it's also possible to enter your own POI's. You can also let your TTG notify you when you reach a certain POI. This makes using the TTG even more fun, because this enables you to set it up like so that you hardly ever need to enter addresses anymore. Ok, so this was already more or less possible with the "favourites" option, but now you can also put those "favourites" into different categories.
The maintenance of POI categories is very user-friendly, as we're used from TomTom. No manual is required really. For now it's still not possible to change anything about the standard POI categories. You also can't delete them. So the extra POI functionality only really works with POI's that you've added yourself.
Maximum
Keep in mind that even TomTom GO has it's limits. For POI categories, this limit is 96. 40 of those may be created by the user. Not bad of course, but something to keep in mind!
There are of course numerous categories which you can add yourself. What about a "family" category, containing all the addresses of your parents, brothers, sisters, grand-parents, etc.? Or a category with the addresses of all you important clients? It's even possible to easily keep them apart by choosing a separate icon for each category. The most popular category is probably the one for speed cameras. You can add those by means of pre-made POI category files which you can find on the internet. More about that in the second part of this special.
For adding your own Points of Interest, you'll have to go to the "maintain POI" menu again, and then either add a POI to an existing category or create a new category first. If you want to create your own category, then tap "add POI category" and name it. Then you can add POI's to that category by tapping "add POI" (again in the "maintain POI" menu). After you've chosen the POI category you want to add POI's to, you then have the choice to add a specific POI by means of using an existing favourite, an address (street and number), a POI from a different category and even the GPS position. In short: more than enough possibilities for entering new locations into their own categories.
Warning
One of the new options for POI use is the warning-signal TTG can produce when a certain POI comes nearer. This is a very useful feature, especially if you use it to warn you for speed cameras! This feature might save you a pretty penny!
To activate this option, go to the "maintain POI" menu again, tap "warn when near POI". Next, select which category you want to get a notification for (eg. Petrol station). Next, enter the distance from the POI when the TTG should produce it's signal (standard 250 meters). Next, select a warning sound. Lastly, select if you only want to be warned if the POI is on your route or not. If you uncheck this option, TTG will also warn you for POI's that are in close vicinity, but not on your route. This is particularly handy if you're just driving around with the TTG on, but with no route entered. If this option is NOT unchecked then, you WON'T get warned for selected POI's!! This is important to know!
A recent new feature is that these warning beeps and bleeps can be changed into real human voice warnings! For this, read our newsflash about it on this site: Spoken POI-warnings for your TTG. It will tell you everything you need to know about this new feature and how to use it!