GPS navigation - rubbish!

[blowback]

Wotchamates,

Thought I'd share my GPS navigation experiences with the group! My tomtom was nicked from the car last week, and I needed to make a journey at the weekend. "No problem," I thought, "I'll use the spanky new n95 gps!" So, I forked over the dosh for a 3-year license and merrily set off.

An hour into the journey, I was seriously considering doing my lovely shiny new N95 some serious phone harm. The navigation is *dreadful*. My favourite feature by far is it's mysterious silence at T-junctions. Oh sure, it displays the route on the map, but is reluctantly silent. Which is a great help if, say, the **** phone is on the dashboard in order to get a signal and you can't see the screen anyway because the screensaver has kicked in. It makes up for this sullenness at other times though by spontaneously announcing "keep left" or "turn right" on straight stretches of road without a sniff of a junction for miles. It especially loves to do this on motorways, where quite often it will cheerfully announce "at the roundabout, take the second exit." Midway between junctions. It takes a perverse delight in trying to navigate you down cul-de-sacs or the wrong way down one-way streets. Once, in a brief bout of incredulous curiosity, I decided to follow its ludicrous suggestions to the letter, and was rewarded with three identical 2 mile laps of Maldon town centre, and when I finally broke out of this circle of hell the navigation simply switched itself off in silent protest. After starting it up again, it responded with the classic "follow the road ahead for 5 miles....turn left."

If you're considering paying good money to upgrade Nokia Maps, might I suggest that instead you try swearing loudly and fully at every junction and just take turns at random, as this is, in effect, what you will be doing anyway.

Me, I'll be buying another tomtom, funded in part by the refund which Nokia will shortly be providing!

[Raymondo]

My experience with the GPS was nothing like that, and I found it to be invaluable whilst in the north eats of England last week. I got clear instructions, both before my turnings and as I got to them.

Also, the screensaver did not come on once - and it shouldn't do, as far as I'm aware. Maybe you have a dodgy unit?

[blowback]

To be fair, I'm not complaining about the screensaver as I was running it without a car charger or anything, and the poor phone is doing it's best to prevent the battery being subjected to a howling vortex of life-sapping energy drain. When you're using the nav like that tho, the voice prompts become uber-important, which makes its frequent no-comment stance all the more infuriating ;)

[The Patrician]

Mines fine. You need to hook it up to a charger though or it sucks the juice out of the battery faster than a WAG in a Harvey Nick's sale.

You can turn the backlight on all the time as well which stops the annoying shuttign off experience.

[raymasky]

I dont know much about the GPS navigation....but the GPS logging works fine for me ., Now i can map out all my rides .

Check out my link :

raymasky - GPS Mapping using Nokia N95

[Piesang]

It works perfectly for me too. I guess you can't really compare the GPS in the Nokia N95 with a dedicated GPS.

[adiemask]

I too have used tomtom and have found the speed cameral alerts to be invaluable. I've tried out the N95 Navigation and have been suitably impressed but I do miss the 'speed camera alerts', does the forum know of any plans to include the alerts functionality of tomtom into the N95 Navigation program?

[Ardwych]

Yep, I know where they are, adiemask - everywhere. Just drive as though you're sharing the roads with a lot of other drivers.

And, guess what......

(You are.. how old..?)

[adiemask]

Why 'attack' me Ardwych? Speed Camera Alerts are seen, even by the Police, as a valuable resource in preventing accidents. In the UK the speed camera database is a legal and often updated by the police, resource.

I was asking a reasonable question!

[andykn]

Originally Posted by Piesang

It works perfectly for me too. I guess you can't really compare the GPS in the Nokia N95 with a dedicated GPS.

...and you can't compare any other dedicated GPS with TomTom in my opinion. I tried a number of them a couple of years back and my opinion was that TomTom was far superior. So I don't expect the N95 to be as good and will be retaining TomTom.

The only decent backlight setting I have seen is in the Maps application itself (Settings, General, Backlight) that lets you have the backlight always on when using maps.

What i'd like is to be able to have the backlight on always when the phone is powered (for example in a car holder) but not necessarily when the Maps application is running.