Windows is weird.

Even better to have it tell you which supermarket has all your preferred items on your list in stock or even tell you when there is one with all in stock so you can be told that anytime now is a good day to shop.

You cant do any of that with your dinosaur bit of paper list.

And even better to be able to scan the barcode with your phone to add that to the list when you use something and want more.

Indeed also better than paper, although handling a device that has been used by multiple pairs of hands before you get there... and not to mention Tesco!

(Nothing actually wrong with Tesco, but the ones near here are about as peaceful and serene as a rugby scrum, without the politeness!)

Yeah, ours allows you to use your own smartphone and you don?t have to go anywhere near the checkout either.

Using a map?

My satnav is as up to date as Tom Toms maps are. Its the one thing a smartphone does that is truly useful

Its a shame the car cant have its central screen and spekars used as the phones I/O device.

Seems to me most built in ones are a lot inferior to either a decent phone or a Tom-Tom etc that you can buy for about £100. And usually very expensive to bring up to date with the latest maps, etc.

My used car had a full service history and seemed to have care lavished on it. Yet the satnav was near useless in the UK - wouldn't accept the full UK postcode. An upgrade was available, but very costly from a dealer. Eventually got it done by a small specialist who'd got the upgrade and keys etc from Russia.

The problem is finding what road updates are included in a given update package that you download.

Just before we moved into temporary accommodation between selling our old house and buying a new one, a new bypass was built on what would become my wife's journey home from work. It wasn't included in the factory-fitted map database for her car, which we got before the road was opened. Fair enough - we needed to wait for an update to become available. The implication of the bypass not being in the database was that the route from work to home, and hence the ETA and distance to arrival was wrong: it calculated an inferior route. She got used to having to subtract a certain number of minutes and miles from the figures that the satnav displayed to work out "how far have I still got to go" - minor frustration. It took ages for Garmin to release an updated map. I checked the map on Garmin's web site and it showed the bypass. So I spent ages downloading the 4 GB file over a slow 1.5 Mbps internet connection, and I installed it. And the bypass *still* hadn't been included. There were benefits of other new/changed roads throughout the country, but not the one that mattered.

It took until the next upgrade, some 5 years after the bypass had opened, and by which time we'd moved away from the area, before that bypass made it into the map database.

The maps are now as up-to-date as they will ever be, because the free access to updates lapsed once the car was more than 5 years old.

In contrast, Here Maps on my phone got the map update within a few weeks of the bypass opening: I just re-downloaded the UK map and the road was there. And I can continue getting further updates forever.

I tend to enter the destination when starting the journey, but only activate (or take notice of) the satnav once where dragons be.

Yep, if you want to do it that way.

So is street view when you want to see if a particular place on the map that looks interesting is worth visiting.

It can with any well designed car.

Oh dear. Fred is off on his 'shiny thing make it all better' trip

Only about 12 car manufacturers currently have android auto on *some* models

Nope, I have enough of a clue to realise that a large screen designed into the dash works a lot better than the small screen on a smartphone or stand alone satnav in the car, even if you are too stupid to work that out.

That?s bullshit.