To: care@telenav.com From: hobbit@avian.org (*Hobbit*) Subject: Re: a few questions In regard to you wanting ... Name: Phone #: Phone Model: Operating System #: Carrier: Telenav version: Reference Number: 365197201 [via: "Jacob T."] Personal details aren't relevant, as my questions are general and likely affect many users. As I mentioned, it's a Sprint phone -- a Sanyo Taho, to be specific, running BrewMP 1.007SP and Sprint Nav 2.8 or as your software describes it, 2.8.0.55. Right now it appears to be in "premium trial" mode as the phone was recently acquired. Since we appear to have bidirectional email capability, I'll just go ahead and ask my questions. Please escalate these to whatever resources you need to obtain answers and get the relevant suggestions/fixes into your development process. If any of this has already been addressed, please instruct me how I'd get an updated version onto the phone. 1. Menu handling: When a vertical list of menu items is presented to the user, with the top item highlighted, using the "up" navigation key should make the highlight WRAP AROUND to the bottom and work upward from there. You have departed from Sprint's operational standards for this phone's design in this regard, as every other menu even in the third-party applications works this way. You instead force the user to arrow DOWN through all of a potentially long list of choices to reach one farther down, which is annoying by comparison. 2. Tracks: Most commercial/standalone GPS units can record a "breadcrumb trail" or track of where the unit has traveled, and such information can be downloaded from the unit and stored, reviewed, turned into KML files to load into Google Earth, etc. It would be nice if your stuff offered this capability. A relatively compact file format such as GDB or just line-by-line ascii text would be easy to store on the phone's internal card, where it would be accessible via USB. User favorites or waypoints are another data item to consider optionally including. If you haven't already, you would do well to consult the documentation for the excellent freeware "gpsbabel" translation utility. 3. Coordinates: There should be a way to display lat/long coordinates of the current location and/or where the user has moved the cursor to, given in a clear way and updated in realtime. Under "diagnostic info" the current location is given but only as a snapsnot, and doesn't update as a user moves around. And in "maps" mode when the crosshair cursor is moved around, it would be easy to display a single line of its lat/long on the screen. I can sort of get a cursor location by asking for "cursor address" in the pop-up options and then hitting "cancel" fast enough before the maybe-briefly-shown coordinates are usually replaced by a street address, but that's klunky and unreliable. You will help the geocaching and place-logging crowd considerably by simply having *some* way to display realtime coordinates straight from the GPS receiver. Even just presenting the cursor coordinates as it's moved around would be enough, as the user could then just slide the map until the cursor is on top of their own location dot. You would likely want to have display format options, as some users prefer decimal-degrees vs. d/m/s vs. others. 4. Maps and searching: There should be a way to begin a search based on a cursor position that a user has moved to in the static maps, instead of having to start from a typed-in city or other point of interest. In other words, a "search from right here" facility where "here" is the cursor location, not the current GPS location. It is often the case that someone uses the mapping to look around a target area without necessarily knowing much about it or what's there, but would then like to, for example, search for motels right around that same area. 5: Sticky settings: Options like "hide traffic" should be saved across invocations of the software, as users expect most other settings on their phones to remain in place once changed. If someone is generally not interested in the traffic data, forcing them to receive it next time they go to their maps is just a waste of bandwidth. 6: Motion: sliding the static maps around with the navigation rocker is awfully slow. Consider adding a configurable "acceleration vector" for when the key is held down? Most commercial units have some equivalent. 7: Cleanup: There should be an easy way to delete ALL favorites and/or ALL the recent places. Especially the latter, where spurious junk can pile up rather quickly. Even though I've read the user's guide PDF on this, I'm still a little confused by the three account tiers and the pricing model and what happens after this "trial" expires, but perhaps I should be asking Sprint about that instead of you folks. My own tendency will likely be to go with "lite" as my existing standalone GPS units offer a much more streamlined, purpose-built user interface, at the expense of not having the absolutely freshest data which presumably would come from your servers via Sprint. Thank you in advance for handling all this in a responsive and professional manner, keeping the potential content of external product reviews in mind. _H*