An Ode to TomTom:
Sweet Spots and
Baroque Phases of Interactive
Technology Lifecycles
Jan Borchers
RWTH Aachen University | borchers@cs.rwth-aachen.de
A few months ago my sweetheart said one of those things
that would make any geek start
drooling: “I hate getting lost
each time I drive into Cologne.
Can’t we get a Tom Tom?” I love
getting a free ticket to spend
obscene amounts of cash on a
gadget, without all the weak,
post-hoc rationalizing of why it’s
so useful, which is usually met
with something between fury
and pity, depending on its price
tag, size, number of cables, and
overall potential for destroying your living room’s visual
appearance. But I digress.
For those of you who have
been living under a gadget-proof
rock for the past few years, a
Tom Tom (mine is a GO 910) is a
GPS car-navigation system made
by the current market leader
of the same name. You stick it
to your windshield with a suction cup, tap in your destination
address, and off you go, hopefully in the right direction.
It has also become the technology to most profoundly
influence my everyday life since
my first DSL flat rate in 2001.
And that’s despite not being a
regular driver—or maybe just
because of that.
Now, I will admit that I got
my first mapping-software fix
back in ’97, when a little-known
Dutch software company called
Palmtop had just released
EnRoute, a route-planning application for my favorite personal
computing device of all time,
the Psion Series 5 PDA.
But back then, of course,
there was no live navigation
support. GPS devices were still
something supremely geeky,
and well beyond the purchasing
power of your ordinary com-puter-science grad student (i.e.,
me). Geocaching had not even
been invented.
Also, in all honesty, only
geeks had PDAs back then,
so this was definitely not yet
affecting the public at large.
But we, the bold and fearless
early adopters, could explore
this strangely empowering new
world of geographical information literally at our fingertips.
While I hardly used it for the
demanding task of live, in-car
navigation, it became indispensable to quickly estimate
driving times when planning
trips, or to simply hide my
deep geographical ignorance
in a conversation on, say, the
wonderful architecture of
Barcelona, by discreetly check-
ing which country that was in
again.
While it did become possible
later to attach a GPS to your
PDA (until you realized that
multiple loose devices, power
adapters, and 200 feet of cable
around your dashboard weren’t
exactly safe, and that setting up took longer than most
actual trips), it wasn’t until
around 2004 that Palmtop—now
renamed Tom Tom!—and others
started selling all-in-one devices, and live navigation support
became a realistic option for the
average consumer.
Boy, what a difference.
Instead of having to map out
each new trip in advance; write
down or print out those instructions that as soon as you hit the
road you realize are conveniently still sitting on the kitchen
table; have your codriver call a
friend for instructions on a bad
cell phone connection, which
he’d then repeat back to you
while you’re nervously peeking
at each new street sign because
it could just be the one where
you had to make a right (or was
it left?)—in short, instead of
this constant sense of sublime
(or not so sublime, depending
on the nature of your fellow
