MRA First Use for a Tour - the Good and the not so good
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I've used MRA (and TYRE before that) for routed planning and I've had the App for some time mainly as a back up to my TomTom. However my TomTom died a watery death in Ireland last summer and as TomTom seem to have abandoned motorcyclists I took the cheap option with an AOCI C6 Pro. I thought it might be useful to share some of the highlights and lowlights of the first serious tour I've undertaken with the AOCI, and MRA Nav (Version 5.20) - using an iPhone 17.
Big highlight is waypoints - with the TomTom it was easy to forget that I put a waypoint in for a possible coffee / lunch / sight seeing stop as once loaded on the device they didn't even retain numbers, never mind custom names. Now I can colour code waypoints according to purpose, and give them names that appear on screen and are read out (as long as you don't use numerals). However this feature allows smarter use of waypoints - most "planned" coffee, lunch, petrol stops aren't compulsory but are "just in case". Now I can put a waypoint on the road that I'm travelling on with a Name or description like "Next left turn for coffee" or whatever rather than putting the waypoint into the left turn so that I physically go past the coffee shop. For a TomTom user the ability to automatically skip waypoints that are missed is also a revelation - no longer is it necessary to stop and delete or just ride down a particular road to "collect" an errant waypoint
On the not so good side I suspect that most of the issues are not really MRA related. The non Map related information on the screen is always contentious and I wouldn't want to get into what I would prefer added or taken away save to say a small sidebar for containing a number of them would be great - but I understand that unlike TomTom and Garmin the developers have no control over screen sizes, resolution or orientation.
The distance to next waypoint could be bigger (at the expense of the size of the icon?) but the colour coding of it is really useful.
I haven't found an ideal Map view, the contrast for minor roads is not great in most options (except the roads only version which cuts out a lot of other map features) a minor white road on a light grey background can be hard to see. I guess this is a map provider issue? I accept the AOCI might not have the brightest screen too!
I had an issue a couple of times with some information not loading on screen - almost like the car play connection was throttled - so although voice directions and distance to next turn seemed to be OK everything else appeared and disappeared on screen or was very "laggy" - I assume this is a CarPlay issue as turning off the device and turning back on (thus causing Carplay to reconnect) seemed to solve the problem.
If I'm being picky a non robot voice would be nicer to listen to
The only other downside is that now I have no back up option (apart from the now dried out TomTom - which I'm reluctant to contemplate using - see my comments on waypoints!) -
I've used MRA (and TYRE before that) for routed planning and I've had the App for some time mainly as a back up to my TomTom. However my TomTom died a watery death in Ireland last summer and as TomTom seem to have abandoned motorcyclists I took the cheap option with an AOCI C6 Pro. I thought it might be useful to share some of the highlights and lowlights of the first serious tour I've undertaken with the AOCI, and MRA Nav (Version 5.20) - using an iPhone 17.
Big highlight is waypoints - with the TomTom it was easy to forget that I put a waypoint in for a possible coffee / lunch / sight seeing stop as once loaded on the device they didn't even retain numbers, never mind custom names. Now I can colour code waypoints according to purpose, and give them names that appear on screen and are read out (as long as you don't use numerals). However this feature allows smarter use of waypoints - most "planned" coffee, lunch, petrol stops aren't compulsory but are "just in case". Now I can put a waypoint on the road that I'm travelling on with a Name or description like "Next left turn for coffee" or whatever rather than putting the waypoint into the left turn so that I physically go past the coffee shop. For a TomTom user the ability to automatically skip waypoints that are missed is also a revelation - no longer is it necessary to stop and delete or just ride down a particular road to "collect" an errant waypoint
On the not so good side I suspect that most of the issues are not really MRA related. The non Map related information on the screen is always contentious and I wouldn't want to get into what I would prefer added or taken away save to say a small sidebar for containing a number of them would be great - but I understand that unlike TomTom and Garmin the developers have no control over screen sizes, resolution or orientation.
The distance to next waypoint could be bigger (at the expense of the size of the icon?) but the colour coding of it is really useful.
I haven't found an ideal Map view, the contrast for minor roads is not great in most options (except the roads only version which cuts out a lot of other map features) a minor white road on a light grey background can be hard to see. I guess this is a map provider issue? I accept the AOCI might not have the brightest screen too!
I had an issue a couple of times with some information not loading on screen - almost like the car play connection was throttled - so although voice directions and distance to next turn seemed to be OK everything else appeared and disappeared on screen or was very "laggy" - I assume this is a CarPlay issue as turning off the device and turning back on (thus causing Carplay to reconnect) seemed to solve the problem.
If I'm being picky a non robot voice would be nicer to listen to
The only other downside is that now I have no back up option (apart from the now dried out TomTom - which I'm reluctant to contemplate using - see my comments on waypoints!)@Ian-James, map colors are limited indeed. But personally I find Dart Topographic pretty good concerning contrast. Could still be better though. I am hoping some day we will see a map-overlay feature so we can choose multiple sources of (visual) maps.
I believe I have seen multiple comments on problems for the AOCI units. It might not be the most advisable unit right now. But you can open a support ticket and attach loggings. Maybe devs can isolate the problem.
About the voice, that comes from your phone. You can choose from multiple voices and even multiple TTS packages (if there are more than one, which some Android devices have). On my own devices, I cannot say that anything sounds "robotic" at all.
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