Nokia Drive is great but still needs many improvements

[trainplane]

The 920 has one of the best features of any smartphone, a free offline gps, but it to replace a good Garmin, it needs to be more user friendly. Here are some of the deficiencies I've found in real world usage.

1. No auto-complete. My Garmin asks to type the city, street number, and street name in that order and it auto-completes everything except the number. If Drive has an input option like this, auto-complete would be easy to implement.
2. Save to favorites is cumbersome to use. You type an address and save it but it names it by the street name. To rename it you have to back out to your favorites and rename. It should let you rename right when you favorited the location.
3. When you do a search for a location on Bing and use Drive to locate it, you can't favorite that destination. You have to retype the entire address to favorite it.
4. It doesn't have a set home feature. What I did was pin my home to the main screen as a workaround.
5. Drive needs to have a lock mechanism so only hard buttons are active. More than once I accidentally exited the application in the middle of the road. This could be an OS limitation though.
6. It doesn't have points of interest destinations. Yes, you could use other tools probably to find the same info, but Garmin's POI is offline and integrated. This is a big feature to ask so it probably won't get implemented.

I know it is still in beta as they like to put it, but I hope they are working to improve the user experience and not just fix bugs. Right now, I'm nowhere near able to toss my Garmin for this.

 

[fulnix]

You could just download the Garmin app while we're waiting for Drive to get out of Beta. I use it all the time its great...although still not might have everything your looking for.

 

[Huime]

Actually the belle version does all the things you mention. However as other wp8 settings showed, you might not get those functions as WP tend to push for cloud service, which means that these function will drain/put good use of your data allowance.

 

[trainplane]

Actually the belle version does all the things you mention. However as other wp8 settings showed, you might not get those functions as WP tend to push for cloud service, which means that these function will drain/put good use of your data allowance.

What is the belle version?

You could just download the Garmin app while we're waiting for Drive to get out of Beta. I use it all the time its great...although still not might have everything your looking for.

Which Garmin app, Streetpilot, Navigon?

Anyway, one of my intentions with the 920 is that after it retires when the next big thing comes out, I was hoping to use it as an offline gps. It will be a wifi only device so maps can be updated but no lte connection. Perhaps that is too ambitious.

 

[robmif76]

To be honest I think Drive is a massive let down in its current state. It's nowhere near as usable as a bog standard sat nav kit which is a pity.

As in a load of other items, we'll wait for upgrades but the list of upgrades being waited for is getting massive.

 

[fulnix]

Garmin Street Pilot is what I use. You can't use it offline though. I don't understand why we have the ability to store Nokia maps locally but we have to be connected to plot a rout....I'm hoping this is something to be fixed with Drive coming out of beta.

 

[Huime]

What is the belle version?


Which Garmin app, Streetpilot, Navigon?

Anyway, one of my intentions with the 920 is that after it retires when the next big thing comes out, I was hoping to use it as an offline gps. It will be a wifi only device so maps can be updated but no lte connection. Perhaps that is too ambitious.

Symbian Belle