N80 Satnav & Nokia Maps - Oh how we laughed

11 replies · 3,719 views · Started 22 June 2007

superleccy 22 Jun 2007, 08:37

Yesterday I tried Nokia Maps for the first few times as a SatNav aid.

1st Trip - 9 miles to the next town

I didn't think I'd be able to get a GPS signal in my car, but I was wrong - it actually worked.

I also liked the fact that you could search by postcode, and that you could pick destination and start points from your address book.

The accuracy was good; the instructions to turn left/right/whatever were generally issued with perfect timing. Despite knowing the route myself, I decided to try and follow its instructions and see where it took me. Through town it led me on a right merry ride, almost round in a circle at one point, but it seemed to know where it was going. However, at one critical point it (at a farily notoriously complicated local junction) the instruction was so vague that if I hadn't have known better, it would have led me onto the motorway in totally the opposite direction, with no chance of u-turn for about 12 miles.

However, if you don't follow the route it gives you, it seems to calculate a new route based on your new position fairly quickly.

2nd Trip - 40 miles to a village in the next county

A friend was driving this time, and another friend had printed directions to the dinner party, and I had the SatNav running on the N95. None of us knew where we were going.

Some of the route calculations were bizarre. Just two examples:
[LIST=1]
[*]At one motorway exit, instead of directing us off at that exit (which it should have done), it instead directed us to the next exit several miles away, told us to do a U-Turn back along the motorway back to the original exit and then leave the motorway. WTF?!?
[*]At the end of the journey, we could see our destination with our own eyes about 100 yards away, but the N95 insisted on directing us in the opposite direction on a 1 mile round trip. Again - WTF?!?
[/LIST]
Needless to say, the N95 became the laughing stock of the occupants of the car. If we didn't have the printed directions, I think we'd have been on the road for twice the time.

3nd Trip - Back home

I couldn't get a GPS signal at all. I tried for about 30 minutes. The rest of the car applauded & cheered when they realised the thing had stopped working.

*************

This was the first time using any kind of SatNav. I like it, but the randomness of the routing algorithm makes the thing almost uselses. I was hoping I could use it for driving in Inner London, where I always get lost, but based on yesterday's experiences, I don't think the N95 with Nokia Maps would help matters.

Someone tell me TomTom or Route66 is better than this, please?!?!

Cheers
SL

chrsfrwll 22 Jun 2007, 08:51

Is this with the old version of Maps or the new release?

Quakester2000 22 Jun 2007, 10:35

TomTom is a way better unfortunately you have to buy an external blue tooth gps receiver but still amazing and worth it.

superleccy 22 Jun 2007, 11:13

chrsfrwll wrote:Is this with the old version of Maps or the new release?

Dunno. It's the one that came with the phone, which I got earlier this week.

How can I tell what version it is?

robgreb 22 Jun 2007, 11:38

You'll have the "old" version. The new version was available for a short time on www.smart2go.com. It should reappear in the forthcoming N95 firmware update.

I've not tried the newer version for satnav, but it seems a more polished product than the older one.

Neither of them are a patch on a "proper" satnav application like Tom Tom, Route 66 or Navicore. And all of these have their quirks and will happily send you round the houses.

You should think of satnav as an aid to driving, not a substitute. Adding features like live traffic updates makes them more valuable, too. (Nokia Maps won't do this, but Navicore, for example, will.)

clive1 22 Jun 2007, 20:03

tried the new maps software on a short trip, when i came to the roundabout i should of taken the first exit instead it told me to take the second exit which would of sent me the wrong way down a oneway street 🙄
strange thing is im sure when i looked at the screen it was showing the first exit while telling me to take the second :con? i`ll try it again sometime to see for sure

autopilot 23 Jun 2007, 17:05

Nokia maps, even updated, is absolutely terrible. I'm shocked at how flaky it is, it's liek travelling back 4 years to what early Sat Nav software was like. I think a lot of people are wowed by it because they have never used sat nav before, let alone decent ones. But trust me, once you have use Copilot or Route66 (or TomTom with a BT GPS unit) you will laugh at the thought of using Nokia's effort again. At £60ish, Copilot is a bargain. And that's just the cost one speeding fine you might save with 'proper' sat nav software, as they support Speed Camera POI's.

3Shirts 25 Jun 2007, 10:47

Agreed. Look at the post on here about route66. It is a convoluted process but you can buy the latest version and install a slightly older version over the top which supports the N95s internal GPS.
It's much better. The problems I find with smart2go (the built in maps app) are the logic (or lack of it) on the route planning and how fussy it is about satellites. It seems to wait for 5 strong signals before giving you anything whereas route66 only waits for 3 before starting. Not as accurate but its close enough to map you to the road your on and it soon picks up more once its running

superleccy 26 Jun 2007, 21:26

Tried it again twice over the weekend, but on these occasions I was lost, genuinely didn't have a clue where I was going.

Each time, it got me to my destination in the end. But...
1) at one time it did tell me to "leave the motorway" when what it actually meant was "don't leave the motorway". This added a good few more miles onto my journey.
2) looking at the routes it took me retrospectively... really it is using some pretty bizarre logic.

But, like I said, it gets you there...

...eventually.

I hope TomTom hurry up with compatible software.

chrsfrwll 27 Jun 2007, 07:54

Whilst I agree that this is not as polished as TomTom (which I learnt yesterday, from a very informative article, has Psion in its blood) I would just like to chip in a few positives. It's free, costs nothing, nada, gratis. If you're going to use satnav as a main navigation device on a regular basis you'd presumably buy a mainstream product. If your looking for an occasional use device, why shell out a couple of hundred quid when you can have one on your phone? OK, Nokia are marketing it quite a bit but I still don't consider this a mainstream product and, taking its limitations into consideration, am quite impressed.

As an aside, I used it for a trip from Devon to Wiltshire last w/e and it mapped the roads I would've taken. However, the one thing that was peculiar was the ETA. It told me the trip would take nearly 4 hours, when in fact it only took just under 2. :con? :con? But other good thing was that for navigation, I only had to pay a couple of quid, by SMS. Nice and easy.

Granted it has it's flaws but for a first attempt at a free product, I think it does well. Oh, and there is no substitute for forward planning - like what a lot of us did in the old days before sat nav came along, and the journey times were pretty much the same. 😉

superleccy 27 Jun 2007, 08:12

Yes, it'd be great for "free"... if it was free. :con?

Sorry, am I missing something? Since when it is free? You have to pay for the voice navigation and the visual cues, don't you? I paid �6 for a week's trial of this. Don't tell me I just threw away 6 quid. 🙄

chrsfrwll 27 Jun 2007, 08:17

superleccy wrote:Sorry, am I missing something? Since when it is free? You have to pay for the voice navigation and the visual cues, don't you? I paid �6 for a week's trial of this. Don't tell me I just threw away 6 quid. 🙄

Yeah, I realised as I wrote that it would come back to haunt me. :redface: (But I paid �5 for a month). I was just trying to put an opposite view, given the free mapping and (relatively) cheap navigation. Everyone seems to want to put it down and I quite like it, for what it is.