I recently started exploring more capabilities of the GPS device that I bought for my car about a month ago. Today I found out how to make phone calls using my cell phone through a Bluetooth connection and to test it out I phoned home. I set it up to call manually on my GPS screen and it worked pretty well so I then called a friend who I was going to visit, this time using a voice command. I wasn’t sure exactly what the commands were for making phone calls, all I knew was that you start of by saying, “Hey, TomTom…”

So I did that and eventually found the proper voice command. Once a connection was established, it went to voicemail so I didn’t get a chance to talk to my friend in person.

I was hoping I could get things set up so I could call people hands free right away but one thing that happens on my cell is that when I call, it asks whether I want to make the call using my phone or Skype. I forgot to set it to use the phone by default so I had to manually choose the call method on my phone. I’m pretty sure I fixed that with the second call I made but I didn’t want make any more calls to test it out at that time.

I went to visit my friend and before I made my way home I set a course to take me home even though I knew the way already, I just like seeing myself on the screen and keeping track of the time and my speed.

I didn’t go directly home, though, I decided to make a quick detour to pick something up before going home. Whenever you veer off course, TomTom keeps yapping at you, telling you to take every available turn to get back on course, which can be irritating. I made my stop and as I was getting ready to finally head home, I decided to try a little experiment.

I pulled up the voice recorder on my phone and started driving, now that I was back on course I wasn’t hearing as much from TomTom. It was when I was nearly back on the highway home that I started my little voice command experiment, the results can be heard in the link below.

Ab Vs TomTom