OT: using tablet as a Sat nav

My Garmin is 11 years old and is just coming to the end of its life, as it is now no longer possible to update the maps, as even just the UK and Ireland section is now too large for it.

SteveW

I found that I needed to either buy a memory SD card or accept reduced coverage on ours within a very short time. The same happened on a TomTom which came with a similar deal.

I wonder how many people actually use the full fat maps ?

I imagine (from how I use them) that most sat navs are needed for the 5% of the journey to access the motorway network, and the last 5% to get to your unknown destination. With traffic routing used by a few.

In fact I find myself looking at the ETA much more than the route most times.

That was certainly the most important reason we bought our first GPS, a Garmin GPS III+ and when trying to find say a campsite when motorcycle camping. Nothing (as you say) more frustrating than getting to within 5 miles of something efficiently and then wasting time and petrol inefficiently on the last tiny bit.

The III+ only had a destination direction pointer over a crude scrolling map but was still loads better than hitting a junction that offered you say 'To the East' or 'To the West' and you don't know how that applies to your journey at that point. Whereas with the pointer you had a good idea which way you needed to go from there.

The GPS V was our first GPS with real navigation.

Assuming the journey is reasonably free moving then I generally only look at the ETA as we set off as it then gives us the 'best arrival time' to inform our destination. We used it just the other day for a ~1 hour journey and an initial 20:05 ETA was actually 20:03 (and I rarely exceed the speed limits anywhere). ;-)

Pre the GPS's, asking the Mrs to map read (whilst I was driving) was likely to end badly as she 1) isn't particularly good at it and / because 2) she get's very travel sick if she looks down to read for more than a few seconds.

Since the Garmin GPS V we have had many of the Garmin range and currently have the Nuvi 215W with free lifetime maps (updatable over WiFi directly from the device) with Bluetooth (so it can be used as a handsfree interface).

Whilst I do used Google Maps on my phone now and again I much prefer the size of the screen on the dedicated GPS and the clear lane prompts etc.

I mostly use Google maps to find the more awkward destinations when the Gamin has got us close and or if walking and trying to find a new to us destination in an unknown town.

If we lost the Garmin GPS today I would immediately go out and buy another (and I still wouldn't bother with the TomTom given to me 'broken' by a mate (and then fixed by me) who then bought a Garmin and found it far more reliable and easier to use). ;-)

Cheers, T i m

TomTom's seem to cover the whole of western Europe. I am probably among many who have never used it in other countries.

More modern systems are sometimes helpful in that they are aware of "live" traffic events, and hence may try and route around congestion / accidents etc. I find my phone is "good enough" that I don't usually bother with the "real" satnav these days.

Google maps still lacks the feature I demand of my mapping solution.

Over Xmas, I met up with my brothers and neither of them could see what was missing, which is worrying.

One of the things I like about using Here (whether on phone or tablet), is the ease of switching from car to foot (or whatever else). And carrying it with me.

(My ancient TomTom, which I sold years ago, was horrible to carry. Otehr devices might be much more acceptable.)

The problem is that if everyone has the same feed, they just move the congestion to a new location.

The last dedicated satnav I had was a Garmin with live traffic feed. However it's routing was well f***ed. I hit a tailback on the M3 once. Was just able to come off the motorway before it was gridlock. The sodding thing then spent the next 10 miles trying to direct me back onto the motorway. Luckily I don't just follow directions but can read road signs too. But I had to get 10 miles clear before it wised up and rerouted.

I find TomTom's idea of "lifetime" service very poor:

ie, it lasts as long as we decide to let it.

My aged 510 is still working fine, and will still download the free updates. However, they have announced that it is no longer compatible with paid updates (not that I was planning any).

Then there is

OK in theory, and they have kindly offered the fix for my aged

More annoyingly, TomTom Home will now no longer permit me to operate the device through the PC when plugged in, which feels like a pointless limitation. :-(

I've recently changed cars, and the new one has Ford sat nav. I am still getting to grips with it.

It is nice to have it built in to the displays, but setting it seems a bit fiddly. Perhaps I should try just talking to it instead of prodding the screen.

Biggest downside so far seems to be that you can't add any POI data that it doesn't already have.

An annoyance is that when you dim the car's displays at night, the touch screen is dimmed much less than the instruments.

Chris

The inbuilt Citroen one I have has never once found anything via POI.

Mind you the previous incarnation didn't accept postcodes apparently (as I learned when I gave a colleague a lift ...)

I guess there'll always be a supply of fresh face innocents who will order manufacturer satnavs, but for myself they are pretty s**te. Even the Ford one I used in a courtesy car. Much simpler to clip your phone in and away you go.

That is common even now: satnavs are determined to get you back onto your original route.

When we return from the south after seeing my parents and my wife's, we use the A46 from Leicester Forest East to Newark (and then on the A1) to avoid the M1 if Google Maps show it is busy. The satnav takes about 10-15 miles before it stops trying to get us back onto the M1; sometimes it even wants us to do a U turn at a junction to get us back to the LFE junction, which is a *lot* further and longer in time that the A46 route. It is quite common to see the estimated time of arrival go *down* by half an hour when the satnav eventually abandons its attempts to get us back to the M1.

We know the route very well, so we don't need the route-finding aspect of the satnav, but it is useful to keep a track of ETA and of distances to "waypoints" along the way (how far to Newark single-carriageway section? how far to Elkesley 50 mph restriction? etc).

Some time, if I'm not driving, I'll have to compare the satnav in our car against Here Maps on my phone and see if they both take about the same length of time/distance to abandon the preconceived route and divert to the road that we are actually on.

Yes, it is important to have a rough mental map of geography and places to look out for on signs, so you know when to ignore the satnav if you are diverting around traffic. Or else a passenger who can direct you by map: we use OS maps on the Viewranger app on our phones / iPad, especially if there are any little yellow roads that would cut off a corner in the main road route.

We've not found that the live traffic feature in our Honda's satnav to be very reliable: quite often it warns of delays that do not exist, or else (much worse) it fails to warn of delays that do exist - and in some cases have done for several hours. Google Maps is much better for showing accurate up-to-date info about delays.

OK, what *is* missing? I presume it's a generic feature rather than duff info about a specific road/route.

My parents have a holiday cottage in the Yorkshire Dales and near the village there is an un-surfaced track that is very difficult for even a tractor (with its high ground clearance) to use, because of huge boulders protruding from the surface and very deep, muddy ruts at the bottom of a gully. According to the locals, it has not been used as a through route (except on foot or for driving herds of cows) within living memory (though it was apparently a fairly important route in previous centuries).

It is a test of an electronic map to see whether it shows that lane as a through route and tries to route traffic along it ;-) I have submitted map corrections for several satnavs in the past - and, to give them credit, the modification gets published fairly quickly.

It's incredibly simple. The current speed limit. Neither Google Maps nor WAZE has that. And I know from the Google Product forums it's a feature that's been long requested.

HERE Maps does have it.

Coming from London back to Brum once I joined the M25 around Enfield and it wanted to send me up the M1. I carried on past many attempts to get me back onto that route until I hit the M40, at which point the ETA was 10 minutes earlier than initially proposed.

Route finding is another area where you realise that "AI" isn't. One of my cv shoutouts is working for a mapping software outfit, so I know how the routing is done - and it's not intelligently.

It may be worth checking the handbook (or fiddling with settings if you prefer) as my RAV4 enables different settings for instruments to that for the touch screen panel.

Yes - I have a Garmin Nuvicam for driving, a Garmin 3790T for walking in cities and a Garmin Nuvi 500 for country walking.

as long as it is set up right, of course

when using Google to visit some sites of interest in France, more than once it directed me to the owner's front door rather than the paying visitor car park.

Fortunately, I noticed that the official signs to the attraction were pointing a different way to the way Google wanted me to go

tim

it comes with ads and in app purchasers

are they intrusive?

(to be clear here, I have previously installed an app that came with ads, that were very intrusive, appearing when I was using any app. De-installing the errant app did not clear this, I had to do a factory reset to get rid of the ads. I don't want to go there again!)

tim

As I'm no longer the person in the driving seat when using maps, it's not the slightest bit worrying to me

OTOH, having maps expire after a month because the details in the mapping may be out of date is big fat royal pain in the arse.

adding the feature that you want makes this more likely, so I could well do without it

tim