Technobabble

The problem

So you have a TomTom and your Bluetooth Mobile phone.

You want to connect them so you can access Traffic data on the move. I’ve used TomTom traffic for a few years and it is excellent –

• It tells you know how much current traffic might delay you
• You can choose to navigate around jams

But it’s not always easy to set up. The problem arises because there are just too many products that have to work correctly together – TomTom, your phone and the mobile phone company.

I recently got my Sony W900i Bluetooth paired with my TomTom 920. That bit was easy but getting the data link and therefore Traffic proved a lot harder. TomTom provide a guidance document on their site. But it did not work completely for me.

Here’s how I finally got it working…

The approach that worked 

First set up the Bluetooth pairing.

Then try to use tomTom traffic. The system will try to set you automatically – just respond to the prompts. But if it fails you will see the screen below:   If you see the screen below, tap Manual.

Then…

1.  Enter the APN (access point name) – in my case it was “pp.vodafone.co.uk”. See this link for details of other APNs.

2. Enter Username and Password for your mobile network provider. In my case they were both “web” as shown See this link for details of other username/ password combinations. 

3. The IP address should always be obtained automatically.

4. Choose Automatic for DNS settings

5. This is the tricky bit! You need to enter Dial characters. The Dial for a GPRS / UMTS network is :*99#. For Siemens and Sony Ericsson handsets you need to enter write code. I found for my Sony W 900i that I needed to insert *99***3#.

I only found this by first trying *99***1#. This did not work (error reported on the TomTom). So I tried *99***2#. This failed too. But the next code *99***3# worked fine. You may need to try five different codes in all, ending with *99***5#.

6. Login script: no script was entered (or needed)!!

All this worked for me – hope it helps