TomTom Route Planner

TomTom has announced a beta Route Planner. Participants will be able to go to the website and create a route based on traffic conditions at the time of day they input, doing what can already be done with Google Maps, albeit with better data in countries with HD traffic. Currently that's limited to the Netherlands and the U.K.; hopefully, we'll see HD traffic in the U.S. in 2009. My impression is that it appears to be as much a PR tool as anything, showing people what great routing data TomTom has.

What we don't know is if you can search for POIs on the site and /or export the route to your TomTom. That would make it quite useful and put some pressure on Garmin to come up with a similar application. I'll let you know if I get approved for the beta. You can register for it yourself here.