@con-hennekens I’m happy to live with our differing viewpoints on how best to ride or drive. And I’m quite sure you are too.
On the words vs image (there’s a song about that!), sure, I agree. But I’m not for a moment suggesting otherwise. My ’case’ is that viewing the road and surrounding environment is vastly more informative than the screen view, not least because it’s live, plus such things as vanishing points can be utilised. We are always potentially small fractions of a second away from disaster and, in my view, anything but cursory glances at a screen are undesirable.
If voice guidance is late, vague or even completely absent (which I have found to be a quite frequent trait of Navigation) and we are caused to look at the screen often and unnecessarily, that’s not some ‘inconvenience’, it’s a major flaw. A user’s choice, on the other hand, to not use voice guidance is akin to the aforementioned option to turn certain Garmin sat nav functions on and off, is it not? Choice vs no choice…
And, yes, advance guidance is sometimes given well before a turn but, equally often, in many environments there are multiple junctions between that announcement and the intended turn. I feel that these, while undeniably useful as a ‘heads up’, are no substitute for well timed and sufficiently clear and detailed follow up guidance.
Due to endless glitches and complete failures, most of my use of the Navigation app has been as a test and in circumstances when I knew routes anyway and didn’t need navigation. I have never felt sufficiently confident in the reliability of the app to venture out without my Garmin on board when I did require navigation (however did we get anywhere before sat nav?🤪). In some circumstances I‘d have been ‘up the creek’ had I tried to rely on Navigation. As someone who really does want MRA to be successful in developing and providing a genuine alternative to expensive dedicated sat nav devices, I find that hugely disappointing…
But, as it stands, Navigation is not just disappointingly inadequate in my experience, it has the inbuilt potential to be bloody dangerous. And yet, despite increasing evidence (via support tickets and this forum at least) that this is a widespread user experience, I have not seen so much as a word from MRA to acknowledge the problem, let alone any effort to fix it. Why?