Quest | Nuvi |
The Quest is displaying three important items that the Nuvi appears to be
incapable of showing me:
And if we're going to bother having street speed limits in the database and try to display them, how about having a configurable "over" threshold above which a configurable audio warning is issued, to help the self-acknowledged leadfoot drivers rein themselves in a little? Make it enabled at 7-over by default! The Nuvi running map, especially at higher levels of detail, seems incredibly noised up with denser contour lines and their numeric elevations, names of random nonessential side streets half a mile from where I am, and names of far more bodies of water than I need to know. All in text that's way too large, and don't think for one minute that there would be any *hint* of being able to set font sizes. [There *is* on the Quest, and for multiple item types!] And everything has a bit more trouble standing out from the terrain-shading in back, where the Quest's simple dark background [night mode] gives a much crisper display. In night mode, the Nuvi displays both streets and contour lines in almost the same pale grey, which can lead to some interesting confusion as to what's a road or not. The triangular pip indicating my position and direction has a tiny center dot on the Quest which indicates *exactly*, down to best screen resolution, where I am, and I use that all the time to figure out if I'm actually at a given intersection or not. The triangle on the Nuvi doesn't, or if it has a center mark it's subtle enough to be invisible and there's no other color option than the non-contrasty blue. If I use one of the other vehicle-shaped pointer types it doesn't have a center mark at all, it's just a splotch on top of the map. And when I try to set the simple triangle for all three "usage modes" it keeps later reverting to the idiotic default little car or pair-of-shoes or bicycle for some reason. Interacting with the static map brings out some of the most horrendous Nuvi design flaws and a couple of outright bugs. Tapping the map doesn't just go into slide-around mode and make the arrow cursor appear; the ENTIRE thing has to be redrawn even if you were already in 2-D view [which can take a while], and only then will it see taps to place the arrow or touch/move to slide the map around. When the 4-way rocker on the Quest is used, the arrow cursor simply appears right on the same map you're already on and movement proceeds completely sensibly from there. The Nuvi's response to touch/slide/release map movement is squirrely at best, often misinterpreting a slide as two or three more arrow-placement commands. Sometimes it leaves a broad stripe of map at a new incoming edge completely blank, never filling in the image until it's moved again. One slightly saving grace for the Nuvi is that invoking static-map mode *finally* starts displaying a few nearby town names. As soon as map-movement mode is invoked on the Quest, a bar along the bottom immediately comes up showing current cursor lat/long, and distance and bearing from the position pip to it. That leads to an intuitive workflow of moving to another place of interest and immediately seeing "aha, that's half a mile to the east" without doing anything else. No such display on the Nuvi, which seems reluctant at best to deal with coordinates much at all, and worse, once you've moved or slid over to a point of interest and see it get a label and a highlight, you can't *do* anything with it except save it or try and auto-route to it. This has to be one of the biggest annoyances, because on the Quest there's an "OK" button which immediately brings up all the details it has on a given highlighted POI that the cursor is sitting on. If it's over multiple POIs stacked on top of each other, which often happens even at high zooms in cities, the Quest will offer a little submenu to ask which one you're looking at and then give you all the details on what you select. There's no way to sort them out on the Nuvi and see the list of, say, all the different companies in a mini-mall or typical small-town office building. The Nuvi also tries to highlight things at ridiculous distances away from where the arrow cursor actually is, where the Quest allows much more close-in selectivity and it's perfectly okay to be pointing to empty space as heck, when you're standing there 40 feet off the road staring at the geocache you just opened up you might actually want to capture that exact spot for some reason. Once you've moved the arrow cursor to a new location, an obvious common task would be to search around that immediate area for whatever's needed. On the Quest, the "find" button brings up various options including "near map pointer", and goes into the standard categories menu from there. I cannot imagine the number of times I've just wanted to scroll around a map and randomly browse restaurants, campgrounds, auto-parts stores, or whatever and look at their details -- address, phone number, etc -- without an ill-conceived user interface getting in my way to prevent it. There's no "ok" or equivalent "look at this" button on the Nuvi, so it stonewalls my efforts to get detail on anything I see unless I save it to "Favorites" and then exit all the way out to the top level [thus losing where I scrolled to!] and go through "where to" and "favorites" and hope I remember what the thing was named. Then I have to clean up the mess it made forcing me to drop more unnecessary turds into the Favorites memory. If there's a faster/better way to do any of this on the Nuvi, it certainly isn't obvious or shown in the owner's manual. If the sat-radio is turned off, another method to obtain coordinates on an arbitrary location seems to be "set loc" to warp the position pip there and then touch it, whereupon it assumes that the only things you need to find from there are hospitals, police stations, and fuel. But you at least get a pair of coordinates in the little "my location" box. Of course if you then save that location, the coordinates get stripped away in the process. Garmin has thrown the best features of static map functionality and user-defined POIs completely away here. Even if you pull something into the "favorites" area and try to work with it, that's relatively useless too -- addresses and phone numbers of various establishments are already in the database, sure, but often we want to make some changes or additions to the info. On the Quest, a saved POI can be freely and fully edited, as most of the info about it is in a single "comments" box. The Nuvi does not allow any way to edit the ADDRESS of a POI, the phone number field only takes numeric data, there are no coordinates of the spot shown, and there's no arbitrary-comment field at all. What if I wanted to add a "driveway on right" note to a POI for someone's house I haven't visited yet? And any user-defined POI on the Quest can easily be MOVED if it's found to not quite be in the right spot -- try that on a Nuvi, without starting over and creating a new one. No, Garmin now seems to think it's much more important to be able to associate pictures and categories with a saved waypoint rather than genuinely useful information. When displaying a long list of items, such as a massive search on all the walmarts radiating out from the current location [try it, it's really scary regardless where you're located], the Nuvi displays the results four per screenful but with no scrollbar or other indication how far down the list you are. You can't tell if the search is done yet, either, unless you're at the bottom and suddenly the "page down" arrow un-greys. The Quest presents a much more compact list with more names per page, a scroll indication, and a spinner if it's still in the process of digging up more matching items -- much more indicative of how it's doing. People have found and informally documented quite a few "easter eggs" in the Nuvi software -- hidden, undocumented functionality. For example, holding down the satellite signal-strength icon brings up the "birds" constellation and signal strength coming from each one, along with the current location's coordinates and elevation. Hey, finally a semi-fast way to see elevation and running coordinates, but I'd still rather not have to poke the GPS at all to get it. Another fun easter-egg is holding the battery icon for about 8 seconds -- which brings up a whole sequence of test-mode pages with battery status, USB details, color tests, filesystem and memory details, audio phrase tests, etc. This yields the added feature that the unit will NOT go into mass-storage when plugged into USB, but it *will* charge the battery from the computer's 5V supply there and even show battery voltage and current in the process. Going to the "trip meter" display and holding anywhere near the middle of the screen for 8 seconds brings up all kinds of software debugging info, probably not particularly useful to anyone other than developers. And I finally found out from the forums that the track-log and user favorites are in the flash filesystem as "Current.gpx", which turns out to be a bloated XML disaster. In general I hate undocumented crap like that, especially when it's the only way I can obtain certain functionality. I *paid* to have a running copy of this software, I should be entitled to know everything it can do [or not]. This kind of bullshit game is what really insults someone's intelligence -- Garmin here is saying "you're too stupid to handle this functionality, so we're going to hide it from you until you figure out the secret handshake." And all this on top of already insulting me at almost every other turn by denying functionality I expect. I tend to cease dealing with people who insult me, as it doesn't make my life any better and I certainly don't appreciate being asked to pay for the privilege of being called an idiot. If Garmin spent less time coming up with useless crap like "whereigo" support or a "garage" full of dumb vehicle icons or sliding its hands farther into Groundspeak's pockets and more time refining what used to be a really intuitive, versatile, and configurable user interface then the Nuvi line of products could be *so* much farther ahead by now. And I bet they wouldn't be inundated under nearly as many support calls! If I wanted to buy a video game box, I wouldn't be shopping for a GPS. Moving from a multi-button interface to a well-thought-out touchscreen environment could have been an awesome jump in usability engineering. Instead we get fewer sensible options, shoved into marginalized territory by more featurization with more complexity like Bluetooth/phone integration and an MP3 player and a picture viewer. The last thing anyone needs is more distractions on the road; most people drive badly enough as it is. Making an excuse for presenting inferior situational awareness with "...but it can play all your music and store your phonebook!" is gross safety negligence when you're claiming to sell a *navigation* product. All that, and they still haven't even come up with a way to interactively show one-way street directions. Am I just spoiled by what I can do with the Quest, or is the Nuvi really such an incredible piece of crap? I'm really trying to understand Garmin's viewpoint on what customers might have asked for and it's just not coming up any other way. The highest irony is that I'm comparing stuff from the *same company*, not even competing brands. This sort of blatant downslide from what clearly used to have some real solid thinking behind it shows me a company that doesn't care anymore, and I'm not even sure I want to saddle my beloved parents with something like that. Good sale price or not, I'm probably going to take this thing back and start looking at TomTom. _H* 091016 |
While I'm well aware that the official product name is "Nüvi", this article is all about information rather than an exercise in screwing around with extended character-sets all the way through it. Flat seven-bit ASCII is quite sufficient to get my point across, which you've already implicitly agreed with if you've read this far. |