I pose what I consider the ultimate conundrum regarding 2DIN nav devices...

Recently, there was a thread on here, regarding crashing on my 2Din Head Unit when it was online. I was never able to properly narrow it down, but I was fairly sure it was due to the main UI taking up so much memory, that when live traffic was enabled, there was low memory resulting the head unit resetting. I tried loads and loads of different iGo's with different sys.txt files but none were able to fix it. I've got it to the point where it'll crash after roughly an hour, which is better than before, but still not what I wanted...

So I bought a different head unit, with TMC + 3G/WiFi. I figured this would be the best of both worlds eh? Surely the end of my Live Traffic problems... oh no, think again. While the TMC hardware works as expected, the 3G is incomprehensibly slow. I'd say it was slower than Dial-Up and that's not an exaggeration. It can just about handle a Google Search from iGo, but Live Traffic seems too much for the connection. Last night, I tried to run iGo with Live Traffic enabled... it was able to download a measly 10 traffic incidents from the server, before timing out or something... While there's a small chance it may have been the fact there weren't many incidents, this wasn't early morning, this was 8pm at night, there will have been hundreds around England... I assure you. So it seems this device may only be good for TMC only. Glad I didn't go the 3G only route now, otherwise I'd be sending it back.

So here are the solutions (although I'm fast losing patience now)

1. Stick with the first device which crashes iGo after an hour of live traffic and hope that an iGo update fixes it. The likelihood of iGo fixing it, is almost nil, because I think the crashing is a simple memory issue and that isn't going to go away.

2. Stick with the second device, and just be grateful I have TMC. I suppose this really depends on how good TMC is compared to iGo Online.

3. Sell both devices and buy a Pioneer AppRadio 2 and start using my phone.

4. Sell both devices and buy an Android Double Din unit which will have 3G built-in.

5. Sell both devices, buy a single din head unit and just use my phone in the cradle.


I can't lie, I've considered number 5 more than once, because I'm just so annoyed. How the hell they got this 3G so badly wrong I don't know. It works fine on the other device and I don't think it's anything to do with network signal or the dongle itself. It's as if there's some fault in the driver that's simply causing it to run at a disgustingly slow speed.

Any help/advice would be awesome here, I'm in a right pickle

Wow, everyone has gone quiet over here ;)

I think I'm going to keep the TMC enabled device in truth.

it's quiet because no one really knows 100% and we don't want to possibly lead you in a wrong direction. tmc can be a difficult option at times when dealing with cracked programs.

chas521 wrote:it's quiet because no one really knows 100% and we don't want to possibly lead you in a wrong direction. tmc can be a difficult option at times when dealing with cracked programs.

Works great for me lol!! It's just not as detailed as iGo Online which really is excellent.

That said, I've now worked out an interesting (albeit odd) bug that is clearly present in the driver of the 3G. It seems to work in bursts? So, like, I turned on iGo and left the TMC antenna unplugged so it could pull any from that, and it clearly didn't want to pull anything down. So I went onto the Search mode and searched using Google for test, all of a sudden, it started populating the Live Traffic and pulled roughly 60 results down, then stopped. Another Google search and it pulled some more down. How odd eh?

Maybe, I can write a simple program that sends a ping packet to Google.com every 5 minutes or something

you appear to have a decent grasp of your problem. i've never seen your particular problem before. others yes. just make sure you back up first before doing any editing.