Testing MRA Next on tour vs. a Garmin XT

Charlie WIlder

Currently on a tour from the UK. Arrived in Cologne yesterday for a weekend off the bike. Hangover isn't evident quite yet but only got back to the apartment at 4am having celebrated both our arrival and my birthday

Having traveled though northern France, the Belgian Ardennes, Luxembourg and Germany on some fabulous roads I've got to say the app performed brilliantly. The Garmin did the occasional annoying diversion as usual. I'm a seasoned Garmin user BTW, have been since Mapsource, did Basecamp and more recently MRA. The routing from MRA Next was consistently as planned with re-routing, when we did deviate, sensible and fairly quick to calculate. Far better than the Garmin it has to be said, I'm completely won over and so glad I joined the beta/pre-sale.

Huge congratulation to the dev team

A few minor requests:

1/ Power consumption; I do have to invest in a better USB adapter for the bike, current one is the Givi in tankbag one that IIRC is around 2A, so delivering 10W to my SP Connect contact charger mount. This couldn't keep up with the phone battery draining gradually with the app running. So had to rely on the Garmin for the morning then run both from lunchtime.

2/ Route line colour. Is there a way to change this? Couldn't find it if there is. The default blue looks attractive but isn't obvious enough at a glance.

3/ Directions volume. Seems you can only adjust them as they're given. As these are only announced on the move, and are fairly brief, I haven't yet managed to turn them up significantly.

4/ Map text size. If its possible two or three text size options for street names would be useful as they're too small to read on a phone screen.

Maybe some of these will be addressed in the public release on Monday, can't wait for that, our onward trip resumes then.

I never thought I'd say this having been something of a Garmin evangelist for about 20 years but it'll be removed and the above instrument panel mount apated to take the phone on its SP connect mount once I'm back home. Either that or I'll get an Android Auto panel, though I might wait for that until there are some better options.

Again, kudos to the team.

Nick Carthew

@Charlie-WIlder First of all happy birthday
I’m glad to hear that you had a good experience with Next compared to the Garmin.
Your points 1. and 3. are being addressed now.
And points 2. and 4. have been mentioned before.

You can change the colour of the position indicator in Navigation settings under the Map layer tab.
This has been changed several times and I think that currently it is set to suit most screens. I dare say that this may be adjusted again at some point.

Charlie WIlder

@Nick-Carthew thanks for the reply and birthday wishes.

Good to hear that power and directions volume are being addressed. Probably the most important ones for me

The route colour I was referring to isn't for the pointer, I've changed that to red which works well. It was in reference to the route line ahead. The dark blue colour looks like motorways/autoroute, I think, on the mapping I have selected. At a glance, when both are on the screen at the same time, it can be visually confusing.

Having the route line colour user configurable, from a small selection, would be a useful touch.

Dikke Wim

@Charlie-WIlder
I fully agree with you.!!! Specially with sun glases on (or a sun sreen in the helmet) it's very hard to discern the route with motorways.

I'm used to a pink color in my Navigator V and in my opinion pink woud be a good choice.

Corjan Meijerink

@Charlie-WIlder sounds great! All aspects you mention are stuff we are working on (such as battery usage) or are on our backlog (such as color options).

Happy birthday