I've just come back from a great days fishing on the river Wye with my mate Brian. To get to the spot we tried to use a sat-nav. A Garmin something or other. It was Brian's. I don't have a sat-nav because on the few occasions I've used one in the past they have been universally rubbish. I'm sure when the work they're great - it's just that they've failed to work for me with sufficient regularity that they no longer get a chance. And this time it was more of the same. Brian spent about 20 minutes trying to enter GL17 9NU, the post-code of our destination. It refused to let him enter the post-code. He typed in GL1 (on a keyboard display that was not qwerty and consequently slowed you down, why?) and it jumped to a screen showing GL16 something or other. Various other options were tried. Nope. It flatly refused to play ball. I've learned that if something's not working there's no point carrying on trying to force it to work. That very rarely works. So we abandoned it and headed off in the general direction relying on good old paper map technology. Much later, quite by chance, we discovered what was going on. The previous sat-nav trip was for our first days fishing in Builth Wells, which is in Wales. Because of this it seemed to have got stuck in Wales. It was only accepting post-codes in Wales. Why doesn't it just let you enter the post-code you want to enter and then see if that post-code is in Wales or England? RUBBISH.
Yeah, Garmin have never quite got their head around the British postcode system. I used to have the iQue 3600, which was excellent apart from looking up addresses which was a bit clunky. So when I got Garmin Mobile XT for a Smartphone I was looking forward to what improvements they had made. No, they'd taken a big step backwards! Instead of improving the cluncky iQue interface they had invented something new and much worse. It took me 20mins of struggling with their interface (including a couple of crashes) before I gave up and used the mobile version of Google Maps instead. That let me find the address and gave me directions in just under a minute. I gather Garmin are working on a new device based on the Android platform, hopefully they'll learn something about UI from Google too!
ReplyDelete