OK, Nokia. We really need to have a chat about Drive+...

[andrewkeith5]

Nokia Drive + is a great application, but does anybody else get annoyed by the fact that it only ever offers you one route which you can neither change nor see the itinerary of?

Yes, there are various options to turn off various types of road, and you can select between Fastest, Shortest or Balanced (whatever that means), but in my case none of that seems to make a difference. Whichever option I choose, the app never seems to pick the route that I would have taken if I was doing the planning...

...I never thought this would be an issue to me until this past 2 weeks, when on a few occasions I've really had to fight the route planner to get it to accept the way I want to go.

The latest example was a trip to London I took recently - ordinarily I wouldn't drive, so whilst I have a pretty good idea of where everything is, I'm hopeless if you ask me for driving directions. As a result, I spent a while considering options on Google Maps before setting off, and decided the best route would be M40 > M25 > M11 > North Circular. This was neither Google nor Nokia's first choice of route (both preferring, for some sadistic reason, to send me right through the middle of central London).

Problems therefore started when I ended up having to park in a totally different place to my actual destination. On the way home, not knowing what the way back to the way I came was, I was stuck with Drive+ and it's torturous desire to take me past every london landmark before letting me go home. I should perhaps point out that at 11pm in the evening, paper maps aren't readily available, and as a result it took me 45 minutes longer to get home than if Nokia had just taken me the shortest way to the motorway instead of right through the city.

This could all have been avoided if there was just a simple option which calculated 2 or 3 routes and asked which one I'd prefer to take - even if it appears longer/slower/less 'balanced' a human with a vague knowledge of the area is likely to make a better decision than a computer with a (seemingly pretty bad) routing algorithm.

Alternatively, PLEASE Nokia set your routing algorythm to take me to the motorway/A-road network as quickly as possible - the British countryside is beautiful, but I have places to be...

 

[diego15nets]

I completely agree. These are my two main annoyances of Nokia Drive. The gmaps app, which is also free, lets you see alternate routes and the itinerary. It just doesn't have voice turn by turn.

Hopefully Nokia can add these features sooner than later.

 

[psiu_glen]

Great, this sounds promising (928 arrives for me tomorrow).

Google Nav has undoubtedly been improved since I was using my OG Droid, but it was the same way. I live in the Detroit area and rather than go from west suburbs to northern suburbs in some of the ring freeways, it thought plowing through the downtown routes at rush hour would be good. It also had a "stairstep" fetish. Most of the main roads here are on a mile grid, so you can go all the way east/west on one, then north/south and bam, at your destination.

Or what el Goog desired, which was 1 down, 1 over, 1 down, 1 over...ugh (and some of them cruise faster as well, so again, local brain is better than the computer).

Our Garmin can be pretty dumb as well. What I have found is to just enter the destination, and go the way I know is best. It will need to update as I go, and eventually our routes will match. This also ends up at least having the live map in front of me while navigating so I can see the upcoming roads/highways, etc.

 

[Huime]

Just curious why wouldnt it send you to motor way if you had the fastest route chosen?

 

[andrewkeith5]

Great, this sounds promising (928 arrives for me tomorrow).
Our Garmin can be pretty dumb as well. What I have found is to just enter the destination, and go the way I know is best. It will need to update as I go, and eventually our routes will match. This also ends up at least having the live map in front of me while navigating so I can see the upcoming roads/highways, etc.

I'm sure you'll enjoy your 928 - as you say I doubt this is a Nokia-specific issue, I just wish Nokia in particular would do something about it!

Indeed Drive+ will reroute itself until it realises you aren't in the mood and lines up with what you want, it just seems to vary on how long it take to do so!

 

[andrewkeith5]

Just curious why wouldnt it send you to motor way if you had the fastest route chosen?

I think I had it set to balanced as that seems to give the best option in more situations, but I haven't noticed that much difference between the three...

 

[Huime]

fastest will usually force you to motorway or highway. Balance is to bring you through main streets and shortest brings you to the sometimes wicked shortcut available or not available (I am not kidding, there were once it guide me to a stair way in attempt to navigate me down a hill).

 

[o0Nighthawk0o]

Just need to keep in mind that this is a beta app. While there are some things missing I find that it works fairly well. It has yet to fail to get me to any destination I have set.

One cool feature that I hope they implement is integrating the here.com site fully with the Here apps on WP. You can already set favorites/collections at here.com and they will sync to your phone but saved routes don't sync yet.

 

[andrewkeith5]

fastest will usually force you to motorway or highway. Balance is to bring you through main streets and shortest brings you to the sometimes wicked shortcut available or not available (I am not kidding, there were once it guide me to a stair way in attempt to navigate me down a hill).

See that works in theory, except in practice it isn't always like that - many of the roads in central London are still numbered as A roads (i.e. major road), so the system doesn't know that they are in fact an absolute horror to drive through.

 

[andrewkeith5]

Just need to keep in mind that this is a beta app. While there are some things missing I find that it works fairly well. It has yet to fail to get me to any destination I have set.

One cool feature that I hope they implement is integrating the here.com site fully with the Here apps on WP. You can already set favorites/collections at here.com and they will sync to your phone but saved routes don't sync yet.

I would love to put this down to being a beta app, but let's be honest, that means almost nothing nowadays. They have implemented sync, yes, and it works well (it would work even better if here.net was any good), but this is down to the routing software/algorythms.

I never complained that the software was no good, I merely pointed out an area where it could be/needs to be improved. There has been almost nothing added to Drive+ apart from a silly name and web synchronisation, and I'm starting to wonder if Nokia will ever put back half the features missing from the original Drive......... ?

 

[original.woodster]

I would like to know what features are missing from Drive+, currently rocking a 610, and have been using the drive app alot since I passed my test, driving to Liverpool from Manchester the other weekend was good. The gf doesn't like long motorway stretches so I can turn them off and go A roads to my destination. Sometimes at a large junction, Drive thinks im going the wrong way and can take a few metres to re-calculate, but that's just a little annoying. I WAS looking forward to trying out Here Drive or whatever it is, to point out land marks or local POI's, even petrol stations and cash machines if that is possible.

My gf has just got a BB Q10, when we went to Liverpool, I thought my Nokia was taking me the wrong way, I asked her to try out her maps, and I noticed it seemed to have live traffic updates? It said there was some congestion on a road ahead. This would be a nice feature to incorporate.

 

[scgf]

When I had an iPhone I used Co-Pilot. After using Nokia Drive+ on my Lumia 920 for a few months I was delighted when Co-Pilot came out for Windows Phone. I was even more delighted when it transferred my licence over while setting it up.
Co-Pilot is an excellent SatNav app and allows you to choose between alternative routes. The voice instructions are brief and to the point as opposed to the more verbose Nokia Drive+. I found this important when listening to music or voice podcasts over Bluetooth - you miss less of what you're listening to, lol.
Nokia Drive+ is the most bizarre SatNav I have ever used. Once I needed to turn into a hotel on my right and it sent me three miles down a normal A-road (not a dual-carriageway), round a roundabout and back down the same road for three miles before instructing me to turn left into the hotel! Had I been exercising common sense at the time I would have ignored it. There have been a few instances like this. Most odd.

 

[TallAssRob]

I agree with the above post. If Nokia Drive isn't enough for you try a more premium nav app like CoPilot. It has the ability to choose alternate routes, set detours, waypoints, live traffic etc. With Nokia Drive or Google Maps you only get what you pay for.

 

[Mystictrust]

What ever happened to My Commute? Wasn't Nokia supposed to add that to Drive? I thought it was supposed to be there at launch, then it got delayed, now not a peep.

 

[Benjamin Cox]

You know the thing is that Nokia Drive (especially now that it is not beta) should be a premium app. It did cost Nokia 8 billion to purchase the company. I have been playing with it today since it sent me down some serious back roads and I found that when I opened the map app it was a better route to do the walking route than the driving route. It is frustrating, I want it to be really good but it just is not yet.