VZ Navigator
Saturday night, Barbershop Steve called to ask if I wanted to grab ddmerillat and head over to his new pad to do some singing. He had a baritone in mind that was willing to make the drive. "Where's your new place?" "Orchard Park". Not having any idea where Orchard Park was, I mused that we'd have to hold off until we know whether or not the show we had tickets for was catastrophically overbooked or not. The drive to Orchard Park turned out to be almost two hours, so that wasn't going to work. I suggested Sunday afternoon.
Anticipating a drive to parts unknown, I downloaded VZ Navigator to my cell phone. This is Verizon's attempt to provide turn-by-turn directions via cell phone. It's $10 for a month, $3 for a day. I decided to splurge for the $3 option, but discovered that it offered a one-day free trial. Woo hoo! I did a search for Steve's place and got familiar with the interface. The new plan was ddmerillat driving while I navigated. We stopped in LeRoy to pick up Dennis.
The phone got us to Dennis's place pretty well. The first funny bit was the navigation database's old idea of the shape of Shoecraft Road as it approaches Ridge Road. At one time, Shoecraft was straight, which meant one had to go on Ridge for a bit to get to Hard Road. Now, Shoecraft does a jog to the right that allows Hard and Shoecraft to connect as one. It's been that way for at least two years, but I don't think any of the mapping companies know this yet. Thus, the phone thought we'd gone off the road! It recovered when it saw that we were on Hard, though.
The software also has funny ideas about "keeping left" and "keeping right". It's basically programmed to specifically mention what to do at every highway junction. 490 West approaching 390 is a bit tricky. 490 is down the middle, 390 South is a left exit, 390 North is a right exit. The phone advised us to keep left, apparently to keep us from accidentally taking 390 North! Even when you're supposed to take an exit to get onto another highway, it orders a "keep right" instead of an "exit highway".
I'm frustrated that it didn't provide directions for numbered routes. At a confusing intersection, I need the north/south or east/west designation to help me make the most sense of what it's telling me. "Turn left onto Route 19 South" would be a lot better than "turn left onto Route 19" when I have the signage at my disposal. Of course, if one were to make the wrong turn, it would simply "recalculate". The caveat being that recalculation requires hitting the network, so don't make any wrong turns where there's no cell coverage! I'm still fuzzy on whether "GPS" in a cell phone means it's picking up satellite signals or just that it's triangulating from tower locations. The times we lost GPS signal seemed to correspond with the times we lost cell signal. Moments like that highlight the advantage of a unit fully integrated with the car . . . instrumentation of the speedometer and steering wheel can let the unit extrapolate position even where it can't get a signal, like tunnels.
Dennis knew the way from his place to Steve's but the phone managed to impress with at least one shortcut. At another point, Dennis countermanded the directions, but the system acquiesced quickly and correctly put us on Dennis's route. The software proved frustrating when we hit a road that was completely closed for construction. We were thus forced off Route 20A near Varysburg by a detour. At each intersection along French Road, the instructions were to make "the next legal U-turn" to get back to 20A. Argh! One would hope that a network-connected navigation application like this would have road closure information on hand and reroute accordingly, but perhaps the navigation industry hasn't yet settled on a single method for municipalities to provide such things.
The phone is tied into a business listing, so we were able to search for nearby food when we left Steve's place. That was a plus, but it takes some time to get used to the categorization scheme. Again, despite being networked, the information was a little old. It knew about McDonald's and Arby's but not the newish Wendy's and Tim Horton's across the street.
In the end, I'd say it's a reasonable facsimile of a navigation system. $10 would be extremely worthwhile for a multi-day road trip into unfamiliar territory.
Anticipating a drive to parts unknown, I downloaded VZ Navigator to my cell phone. This is Verizon's attempt to provide turn-by-turn directions via cell phone. It's $10 for a month, $3 for a day. I decided to splurge for the $3 option, but discovered that it offered a one-day free trial. Woo hoo! I did a search for Steve's place and got familiar with the interface. The new plan was ddmerillat driving while I navigated. We stopped in LeRoy to pick up Dennis.
The phone got us to Dennis's place pretty well. The first funny bit was the navigation database's old idea of the shape of Shoecraft Road as it approaches Ridge Road. At one time, Shoecraft was straight, which meant one had to go on Ridge for a bit to get to Hard Road. Now, Shoecraft does a jog to the right that allows Hard and Shoecraft to connect as one. It's been that way for at least two years, but I don't think any of the mapping companies know this yet. Thus, the phone thought we'd gone off the road! It recovered when it saw that we were on Hard, though.
The software also has funny ideas about "keeping left" and "keeping right". It's basically programmed to specifically mention what to do at every highway junction. 490 West approaching 390 is a bit tricky. 490 is down the middle, 390 South is a left exit, 390 North is a right exit. The phone advised us to keep left, apparently to keep us from accidentally taking 390 North! Even when you're supposed to take an exit to get onto another highway, it orders a "keep right" instead of an "exit highway".
I'm frustrated that it didn't provide directions for numbered routes. At a confusing intersection, I need the north/south or east/west designation to help me make the most sense of what it's telling me. "Turn left onto Route 19 South" would be a lot better than "turn left onto Route 19" when I have the signage at my disposal. Of course, if one were to make the wrong turn, it would simply "recalculate". The caveat being that recalculation requires hitting the network, so don't make any wrong turns where there's no cell coverage! I'm still fuzzy on whether "GPS" in a cell phone means it's picking up satellite signals or just that it's triangulating from tower locations. The times we lost GPS signal seemed to correspond with the times we lost cell signal. Moments like that highlight the advantage of a unit fully integrated with the car . . . instrumentation of the speedometer and steering wheel can let the unit extrapolate position even where it can't get a signal, like tunnels.
Dennis knew the way from his place to Steve's but the phone managed to impress with at least one shortcut. At another point, Dennis countermanded the directions, but the system acquiesced quickly and correctly put us on Dennis's route. The software proved frustrating when we hit a road that was completely closed for construction. We were thus forced off Route 20A near Varysburg by a detour. At each intersection along French Road, the instructions were to make "the next legal U-turn" to get back to 20A. Argh! One would hope that a network-connected navigation application like this would have road closure information on hand and reroute accordingly, but perhaps the navigation industry hasn't yet settled on a single method for municipalities to provide such things.
The phone is tied into a business listing, so we were able to search for nearby food when we left Steve's place. That was a plus, but it takes some time to get used to the categorization scheme. Again, despite being networked, the information was a little old. It knew about McDonald's and Arby's but not the newish Wendy's and Tim Horton's across the street.
In the end, I'd say it's a reasonable facsimile of a navigation system. $10 would be extremely worthwhile for a multi-day road trip into unfamiliar territory.