Well, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: if TomTom wants to play with the big boys (Garmin, Magellan), it’s going to have to hand out some pink slips in its customer service and QA departments.

On July 3rd TomTom posted version 6.12 firmware for the TomTom GO, One, and Rider series, and after just a few hours had to pull the update from the site after users reported the update killed their devices, rendering them unable to boot.

TomTom claims they did the right thing and yanked the update as soon as they heard users were experiencing trouble. However, I say there shouldn’t be this much trouble in the first place. TomTom is plagued by little details. Their mounting hardware sucks, the 910 can’t keep time (an odd problem for a GPS to have), and they’ve had several buggy firmware releases.

This isn’t the first time TomTom’s run into the Firmware update crisis. This is the second such instance that we know of. TomTom – while I’m sure everyone appreciates the speedyness with which you release new products and firmware, but please start doing some QA on your code (and do some customer sat training while you’re at it).