Fortunately the cars I buy are old enough that they pre-date the introduction of screen-based controls.
Navigation much better on phone. Always up to date, no extra costs.
Ought to be mandatory equipment, along with reverse sensors. The latter have the advantage of working passively (your hearing doesn't need active focus).
More common are kids drowning in backyard swimming pools.
Now a neighborhood driveway or Walmart parking lot, even the rear view mirror in a older car isn't good enough for me.
I do too. The curse of automotive UX are touch-screen soft buttons and menu-driven UIs. On a car, every major function that you might use while driving should be controlled by a dedicated physical control. This includes pretty much every function present in a car before in-dash screens became common and many things that have been introduced since.
> Navigation much better on phone. Always up to date, no extra costs.
This is true. Carmakers have realized this any many new cars support technology for your smartphone navigation app to display on the center console screen.
Try to drive across continent like that. Google maps and similar will not allow you to pre-cache that much data and once you are out of cell phone coverage, you are stuffed. And by Murphy's law it will be in the middle of nowhere where you need the GPS the most.
I am driving about 3000km back and forth across Europe every summer - from France to Slovakia and back, i.e. crossing France, Germany and Austria before I arrive in Slovakia. One would say - civilized countries, no problem. Except in many places you don't have even 2G signal on the motorway, even less 3G/LTE.
Oh and I am not even mentioning the roaming charges for data. Until recently it was exorbitant - the above mentioned trip would have costed me about 300 euro only in roaming charges if I have used a phone. It is less now after the EU forced the networks to lower the charges but it is still isn't free.
My TomTom doesn't have any of these problems. I certainly wouldn't buy a car with a built-in satnav, that's a pure waste of money and a colossal ripoff on map update costs, but a standalone satnav is still pretty useful if you ever drive outside of a large metro area.
And often even in cities - I have tried to use Google Maps and had Waze on my phone while driving in Paris, but it was so cluttered with advertising crap on the map (especially Waze!) that I couldn't see the route. Not cool when you are relying on it to know which street to take!
I need a satnav solution to drive, not to hack on.
There's also OsmAnd, which lets you download OSM maps for offline use, complete with elevation contour lines and hillshading, and even Wikipedia articles associated to locations. It does offline navigation, too.
Funnily enough, I used the TomTom app with offline maps on my Treo 650, and then it was released for the iPhone a year or so after native apps became available and I got that too. I used it for quite a few years, but eventually Google Maps overtook it in quality and data got cheaper (and stuff like factoring traffic into travel times is a good feature), and I only then used it when there was no cell service at all, which is becoming rarer.
You inspired me to fire it up again just now. TomTom discontinued the original app last year and moved to a subscription service for the new one, and at least they've given everyone 3 years of updates (and it's usually $20/yr), so I'm pretty happy with that. And the old app still works at least until it breaks with iOS updates beyond 11.
Not bad for a $70 purchase, 8 years or so ago.
(I also use OSM maps for my time off-road.)
No. OSM is kinda decentralised and the project prefers to not have "official" or "blessed" apps or services, and instead takes the approach of letting there be a constellation of services, companies and apps in the OSM ecosystem. So there is rarely one official way to do something, and instead allow the community (which often includes people who run various OSM things) to make things with OSM.
I still miss the ability, occasionally, to adjust the volume on the car stereo before I turn on the car. (I recall that I was blasting some music while alone, but now don't want to deafen a passenger, e.g.) On my year-old Honda, the volume knob doesn't start responding for about 15 seconds after I hit the ignition button.
I know I'm romanticizing him, but the story of how Steve Jobs designed the click wheel on the original iPod is how I wish every product was designed: insistence on zero lag and immediate feedback. The above volume knob also has a lag in it's use: turn too quickly and you'll get unreliable or delayed results. I hate that every time I use the knob, I'm kind of second guessing whether it's working. The stereo was seemingly designed with the steering wheel volume buttons as the primary controls.
(currently in a 14 year old car whose maps will never be newer than 2015, and that's OK with me.)
It's a default action for me and takes less than 5 seconds to plug in and drop into (or practically nothing for shorter journeys since I don't bother to plug in), and I'm going to get a wireless charging dock some time now that my phone supports it.
I'm glad our 2009 car doesn't have sat-nav. :)
That's odd to me. We have GPS in our Outback, but we use our phones. I'm pretty happy having the backup that works if we don't have a cell signal, so being glad you don't have it is odd... it's not like it adds significantly to the price.
Every now and again I'll look at the screen and see my car floating across a barren landscape. That's how I know the road I'm on was built after 2013.
But on the countryside there is usually no usable signal for great stretches of road
I have no data plan on my phone, yet I navigate with Google Maps all the time in this way. I just download on WiFi beforehand.
OTOH, Waze is next to useless when trying to first pick a route when you have anything less than a great signal. 2G or patchy 3G? No hope. The dumb app will just give a timeout error after about five seconds or so and refuse to even consider plotting a route. It's like the developers never bother to test their code on anything other than a perfect internet connection.
I've moved on to magnetic mounts with adhesive bases for any of my cars that have a good surface to stick them. Cheap and quick to install. In my girlfriend's kitchen we made a little electronics charging station out of a couple short-depth Ikea shelves and stuck 5-ish inch wide magnetic mounts to the fronts -- real handy for holding the phones and tablets while charging with the screens visible, along with keychains and various other ferrous junk.
I use a Quadlock mount case on my phone so I can attach it to the bike, but the wife likes slightly more fashionable cases :), so I want something dock-ish I can just drop a phone into.
I'm keen on a Qi charging dock for the car now that it's on iPhones, and am looking to get something that'll last a few years.
Doesn’t seem to have caught on though.
I was going to try and use MirrorLink on an aftermarket head unit I bought.
"Step 1. Go buy a special cable"
Well, now I now why no one talks about MirrorLink.
Apologies if my memory’s rusty; I may be getting some of the facts slightly off. But at one point (2012/13-ish) I wanted to build my own in-car entertainment system. ML seemed like a great way to build the part I wanted to build while still having an amp and basic FM for when that didn’t work correctly. It all came to a grinding halt when I found out only certified stuff would interoperate.
Even so, there could have been a standard hardware interface for this, if it was a requirement. But as it is, why would they bother, if they can sell you the car anyway?
I have a Nissan Altima SV with "all the options", including the built-in unit with touch-screen, Bluetooth, GPS navigation, rear-facing camera, etc. It started "acting up" a while back and pretty much doesn't even work anymore. The dealership quoted me ~$1200 USD for a new one.
My girlfriend drives the car, not me, and she just uses her phone (Pandora, Maps, etc.,) instead.