I must agree with MickeyPhelps in the points he makes regarding TomTom manufacturing units with lithium batteries with known fixed lives that are not intended to be replaced by their customers. This is a quite extraordinary thing to do when I cannot think of a single mobile phone or smartphone where the customer cannot easily gain access to and replace the lithium battery on their own.
Moving on from there and comparisons with other devices that use GSM/3G SIM cards we again face the same issue that customers are also supplied with a device containing a SIM card that they are not supposed to be able to access or change themselves.
This means that if a customer with a Live Services unit moves continents between Europe and North America or Australasia or the Far East or goes on holiday in the other continent they cannot replace the SIM card with one entitling them to Live Services in the other continent. As a result they either end up not being able to use Live Services when visiting another continent or having moved to it or alternatively they end up being forced to buy a new Go Live unit just because they have changed geographic location.
I would have thought the Office of Fair Trading or its Dutch equivalent or even some EU regulator ought to have something to say about TomTom producing devices that are made life expired when their lithium battery dies and where customers also cannot shop around to obtain the cheapest possible data deal to receive the Live Services. For instance www.ovivomobile.com in the UK does a SIM card with no monthly fee and 1GB of data for data only devices for a one off £5. Why shouldn't I be able to use one of those SIMs in my Go Live unit so long as I do not use it enough to exceed the 1GB data cap. This would allow me to avoid paying £47 per annum to get Live Services once the unit is more than a year old provided that I was prepared to be served up with the occasional advert on the display from Ovivo Mobile.
When I complained to TomTom about older Nav 2 units with Live Services like my 940 having to pay the same £47.50 annual Live service fee (or more accurately only a small number of customers who have devices more than one year old paying this excessively high fee at all since new unit customers are exempt from it) but only having access to Live Services in 7 instead of 18 countries in Europe when all that was needed was to update my SIM card to one with access permissions for the 18 countries I was just told "hard cheese" (or customer service words to that effect) on the basis that as there were only 7 countries in which Live services were originally available I couldn't possibly expect to get them later on in other countries as the service was expanded. But now I find its even worse than that because even if you buy an Active Dock RDS-TMC mount for an x40 or x50 unit the unit will only get RDS-TMC data in countries where TomTom has decided you shall not have access to Live Services data (eg Spain which I visit regularly) if you remove the sticker on the bottom of the unit and use a pair of tweezers to remove the SIM card evry time you visit a country where Nav 2 units do not have HD Traffic service. This is a very tricky operation and certainly not one intended to be performed by the customer or one that is safe to perform on any kind of regular basis.
As you rightly surmised TomTom seems to completely and utterly lack any focus in terms of the customer ill will that such absurdities in its corporate behaviour generates and the senior management seem to be in complete and utter denial of the problem and by hiding away begind front line customer service staff who are just told to make the customer feel like these problems are his/her own fault rather than the fault of the company who designed and sold them the equipment!
