I've never used a NAV system in a car, so some of these may be basic questions.

1) The system stores your current route when the car is turned off/on right?

2) Is there an addressbook/multiple route feature?

3) At any time, can you use the NAV as a replacement for a paper map (ie zoom out, pan over, see what's ahead, etc)?

4) If you were doing a route from say Dallas to Los Angeles, could you use the NAV to figure out how far away you are from say El Paso while you are somewhere in west texas? (This is the handiest feature of a paper map)

5) Can you do routes from major city to major city, without plugging in a street address? Such as "Denver to Las Vegas" - or mile estimates at least?

6) Does it feature predictive text input - such as entering "denv" it will guess Denver for you?

I'm sure I could answer a lot of these questions if I could get my hands on a NAV unit, but my local dealerships still do not have any demo cars Most likely the first time I'll get my hands on a NAV unit is when my preorder comes in in a few weeks.

 

1. YES

2. NO- (or I just don't know how) but it doesnt really matter because you can proggressively enter the next location as you arrive

3. YES (my favorite feature )

4. YES

5. YES

6. YES

 

There is an address book, and I'm not sure about multiple points along a route. I would guess that you can do it, but I haven't run across it yet, and the manual for the Nav sucks. Upon first playing with mine when I got the car, a lot of the features weren't obvious or intuitive - but a little use and the thing is easy to use with a lot of handy features.

Now what someone needs to do is work on cracking it so we can play movies through the system...

 

1. Yes

2. Yes. Their address book is called "Marked Point." You can create, name and save bunches of marked points just like an address book. Search this forum for Navigation and you will see my screen shots showing this.

Re: Multiple routes. The navi calculates the route to your destination. If you don't like the route, click Detour, Alternate Route and it will calculate 2 more. All 3 routes are displayed on screen and you pick the one you want.

3. Yes

4. Yes. You can keep LA as your final destination, but click Detour, Via Point and you can put up to three waypoints to visit enroute to LA. It will tell you the distance to your next waypoint (e.g., El Paso.) You can delete waypoints on the fly and add others as you go.

5. Yes

6. Yes

"Upon first playing with mine when I got the car, a lot of the features weren't obvious or intuitive - but a little use and the thing is easy to use with a lot of handy features." I agree with these sentiments. Getting a nav system was very important to me, but this one disappointed me at first. I made a concerted effort to start playing around with it to try all features and before long I really understood (better than the manual) how the darn thing works. Now I love it; it's got every feature I wanted and more.

 

I tried looking it up...and this was the thread that came up...but can anyone tell me the purpose of the detour distance feature? What is the purpose of setting the varoius milage? ie 1, 2, 5, 10, etc.

 

That allows you to adjust just how far you are willing to go for a detour (i.e. do you want to take a side street to avoid a congested intersection or do you want to take a different route across the state).