Helmet-donning, leather strutting motorbike riders with a propensity to get lost may find themselves getting all revved up about Tom Tom’s new Urban Rider GPS unit.
Sporting an updated interface with big buttons for making it easier to punch in routes when wearing gloves, there’s just two buttons on the unit: Navigate To and Browse Map.
Advanced features
There’s also advanced features packed into the weather sealed device, like IQ Routes (which uses data collected from thousands of motorists to provide current info on actual speeds on certain roads), advanced lane guidance, and Map Share which collates local info from TomTom’s huge user database.
Battery life is promised at six hours which should see bikers through an average day, although the SD card slot has vanished and the powered mount is now optional, although there’s a basic dock bundled with the unit.
The Urban Rider GPS unit should available in the UK from next month for around £215.
[TomTom]
That’s a nice piece of kit, but surely it has to be close to the end of these stand-alone GPS systems for commuter use as more GPS’s become available on mobile phones for free. I use a Treo 680 with TomTom6 in an Otterbox for water/bash-proofing, plus an earpiece on my bike tours of Europe. There’re compromises with using PDAs as GPS, but I found it ending up cheaper in the long run and got me from A to B adequately.
Tomtom Urban rider are only for the riders that rides home every 3 or 4 hour to charge the damn thing as it comes with out a 12Volt bike charger, what will be the next motorbikes running by extension cord from ones home…