O2 XDA 2i Tomtom Crash Workaround

by: John Applin


Having purchased a bluetooth GPS receiver for my O2 XDA 2i (see my review here), I was a little disappointed that the Tomtom software that I had also purchased would crash every 5 or 10 minutes. This is infuriating because it's not something that you can fix on the move with 1 hand. I would have to stop the car, remove the PDA from it's holder, perform a soft reset which takes a couple of minutes, reconnect to the bluetooth GPS receiver, start the Tomtom software, put the phone back in it's holder, then carry on with my journey. Now imagine doing this 3 or 4 times throughout your journey!

Having searched for a fix on the internet I came up with a range of suggestions from XDA Developers. Some suggestions involved upgrading the memory card to one with a faster read/write transfer rate, which I did but still no joy. I still had the infuriating crashing problem!

I then had a brainwave after receiving an SMS message on the move. When I received the message the phone crashed in it's usual way, still infuriating you might think, but it gave me that Eureka moment. I realised that whenever the phone part of my PDA was attempting to do something it caused the Tomtom software to crash. This would then explain why the XDA would crash every 5 or 10 minutes.


As you may or may not know, each mobile phone network is divided up into 'cells'. Each 'cell' is a region of the country that is covered by a mobile phone antenna. If you are travelling in a car or train there will come a point where you are moving between one cell and another. When this happens your phone (or PDA) will perform a handshake procedure to let the antenna know that you're entering a part of the country covered by that particular antenna. Now obviously this handshake procedure takes just enough resources so that it causes the PDA to crash. I then searched more on the internet for a fix to this problem but could find nothing so I took it upon myself to fix it.

Firstly I tried to find a way that I could disable the phone software part of the PDA while allowing the rest of the PDA software to function as normal, this would obviously mean that the phone functionality was inoperable throughtout my journey but it's a small price to pay for not getting lost. Now I know what you're thinking "just enable flight mode" and while this would disable the phone software part, it also disables the use of the bluetooth stack which renders the bluetooth GPS receiver useless. One option is to remove the SIM card from the phone, while this would work it means taking the back off the phone and removing the battery which causes a soft reset and unnecessary hassle. There is another way!

Here's what I did:

Firstly go to start, settings, phone,

Under security tick 'Require PIN when phone is used',

Input a memorable PIN for the phone part of your PDA,

Navigate back to the main screen.

How to disable just the phone part of the PDA:

From the main screen tap the antenna and signal icon at the top of the screen

Enable flight mode.

Tap the same icon again and turn off flight mode.

A screen will appear asking you for your PIN, at this point click 'cancel'.

Your PDA is now fully functioning apart from the phone part because you have denied access to the SIM card.

How to re-enable the phone part of the PDA:

>From the main screen tap the antenna and signal icon at the top of the screen

Enable flight mode.

Tap the same icon again and turn off flight mode.

A screen will appear asking you for your PIN, at this point enter the PIN that you chose previously.

The phone part is now functioning normally again.

It would be nice to have a proper fix to this problem so that I could receive phone calls and text messages on the move but I can live with this for now.