Dragged kicking and screaming into 20th century

[maddmaxx ★]

For years I liked my Tom Tom GPS navigation unit that I used in all of our cars.  It worked.  It updated when I asked.  I was used to it.

Then:

Tom Tom stopped supporting it which I thought was stupid till I discovered that sometime (now passed) in 2020 it would stop working because, like y2K, it had a built in hardware flaw that would prevent it from syncing with GPS satellites.  New GPS units got expensive so I purchased a cheap Pacific Rim knockoff.  Very nice hardware with a better touch screen.  Terrible software, bad color choices, took strange ways to get to destination, seemed more in line with global navigation than US (especially northeast). And it was traditionally late in calling out turns.  The latter is ok if you are not in a dense area as you know the turn is coming anyway but in dense areas there may be more than one choice in a small distance.

To make a long story longer, I finally switched to waze on my phone.  It works.  It took me two days to get the audio to sync with my car but perhaps that's just a geezer not realizing that the command to bluetooth audio out is not "bluetooth audio out" but rather "do not play sound to phone speaker".  Now all I miss is the size of the screen on the old Tom Tom.

Notorious geezer rant:  "Why do things have to change?"  

[Kzoo]

I’ve been using Waze for a few years now.  Morning and evening on my commutes to alert traffic issues.   I stopped using it during the lockdown and now I have to remind myself since I got out of the habit.  WoKzoo dislikes technology mostly and hates wi use it with her in the car.  It has saved me dozens of stuck in traffic hours.

[Ralphie ★]

My wife always used her Tom Tom also, but does it not work now?  Although in her new crv she uses Apple car play with google maps. I usually fumble around with my phone in my car, but it is a pain. Actually I can sort of set it in the console but it is a little low there. I bought one of those vent holders but it is not very secure. A cow- order used one of those weather tech cupholder mounts and it was horribibble, kept falling over, I bumped it with my elbow, etc. 

[maddmaxx ★]

1 minute ago, Philander Seabury said:

My wife always used her Tom Tom also, but does it not work now?  Although in her new crv she uses Apple car play with google maps. I usually fumble around with my phone in my car, but it is a pain. Actually I can sort of set it in the console but it is a little low there. I bought one of those vent holders but it is not very secure. A cow- order used one of those weather tech cupholder mounts and it was horribibble, kept falling over, I bumped it with my elbow, etc. 

New Tom Toms may work just fine.  Unfortunately the newest of the machines look an awful lot like the Nuvi software I have on my Pacific Rim device and I don't want to spend 3 times as much to get what I already don't like, nor do I want to spend $200 on something better when I already have a phone.  I don't use GPS all that much, but there are trips I wouldn't make without it like JFK in New York.  

I will use Waze this morning when I drive youngest son to a Covid test site because he needs one to move to a different school before opening in the fall.  I could have made the trip after a quick look on google maps and satellite ground view but this will be a good test/practice run.

[Square Wheels]

Waze is kinda creepy.  It looks into your calendar and asks if your heading to XYZ place.  It also detects patterns, like if you go home around the same time every day, it asks if you want directions for home.

Both our cars have connected traffic.  I haven't used Waze in a while.

[maddmaxx ★]

Calendar?

Patterns?

Think retired geezer who erases all previous trips just as a normal matter of security.

[Ralphie ★]

2 minutes ago, Square Wheels said:

Waze is kinda creepy.  It looks into your calendar and asks if your heading to XYZ place.  It also detects patterns, like if you go home around the same time every day, it asks if you want directions for home.

Both our cars have connected traffic.  I haven't used Waze in a while.

They’ve jammed most of that stuff into google maps. That is just standard google creepiness that I thought you didn’t mind!  The other day it gave me this big unsolicited warning that the turnpike was closed, but it was just the common truck or car lanes closed, no big deal. But it surely knows where I am all the time from the GPS. I used to leave gps off as default on my old phone but I just leave it on on the new phone because it has a decent battery. I should start using low power mode again which might keep gps off and help extend my battery life. But I am so lazy even that is a pita to keep resetting after charging automagically turns it off very time. I think it is snot so much laziness as annoyance. We old people are VERY easily annoyed.

 

[Longjohn ★]

WAZE was a hoot when my son and I drove to Disney with two granddaughters in the back seat. My son picked “boy band” for the voice and every time it told us where to turn the girls would repeat it in the boy band voice and then giggle. I like it because it doesn’t seem to get pissed off when you miss a turn or decide to go a different way. Some of the older gps apps acted like they were mad at you when you did that.

[2Far ★]

21st. 21st century. <<sigh>>

[Ralphie ★]

1 minute ago, 2Far said:

21st. 21st century. <<sigh>>

Don’t rush maxx!  One step at a time.

 

[team scooter]

I'll admit, I'm not tech savvy and I don't keep up with all the latest technologies. So when we bought our Miata back in 2017, and our salesman suggested we wait until 2018 to get the new updated infotainment/GPS system, I had no idea what he was talking about. Besides, we have goggle maps on our phones. But the system in our new car is centuries ahead of the one in the Miata. Where the Miata has an SD card that you need to remove to update the maps. The new car updates itself and has even warned us in real time about accidents, road closures and severe storms/tornadoes and suggested different routes to avoid them.

Which reminds me, I should probably look into updating the SD card in the Yata since its never been... 

[Razors Edge ★]

4 hours ago, maddmaxx said:

To make a long story longer, I finally switched to waze on my phone.

...

Think retired geezer who erases all previous trips just as a normal matter of security.

Waze couldn't care less what you do with "previous trips" on your phone.  They're building their database real time and not off any history.  I guess you could try putting your phone in some kind of airplane mode while "using" Waze, but that probably defeats the purpose of Waze vs a traditional passive GPS system.

4 hours ago, Kzoo said:

Morning and evening on my commutes to alert traffic issues.  

Man, I haven't commuted in traffic in over a decade, so I sometimes forget how awful that is and how "alerts" and Waze-type rerouting might be nice.  I will say, with Google, there is such a huge user base, that any re-route is almost overwhelmed immediately on the heavy travel days surrounding holidays.  It did save me about an hour a couple years ago taking some side country roads to get around the bridge traffic gridlock for the Ocean City MD & Rehoboth Beach traffic.

[maddmaxx ★]

3 hours ago, 2Far said:

21st. 21st century. <<sigh>>

How do you assume that I didn't mean it.  It's a standard joke line among us luddites.

[MickinMD ★]

Being retired and using a Tracfone - I hardly use my smartphone when out and about - I loaded HereWeGo on my phone as a back-up in case I need GPS maps because it's free and the maps don't expire like they do on Google Maps.

But I use a Garmin Nuvi 52 GPS Unit in my car - which didn't come with a GPS Unit built in.  It has a 5" display, it shows a split-screen when the road splits, talks and sits on a sandbag that doesn't bounce around on my dashboard, and is visually just below the window so it doesn't block my view but is easy to glance at.

I don't get traffic updates, but it's rare that I would need them. It gets me where I need to go - like to the cheap parking lot a 10 min. walk from the Smithsonian in D.C. when I took my nephews there for a great day last year - even after I got trapped in a must-turn-left lane and had to recover.

It's not perfect and limited in route info - all my relatives in the Wilkes-Barre, PA area live in the suburbs opposite the city on the West side of the Susquehanna, but Garmin wants me to take the Exit off I-81 that goes through downtown Wilkes-Barre on the East side of the river instead of taking the expressway a few miles further north off I-81 and getting there much faster.

But it's great for things like restaurants or stores I go to only once in a while and I know how to get to the road they are on but can't remember if they're 3 miles or 8 miles or in between down that road.

 

[Airehead]

6 hours ago, Longjohn said:

WAZE was a hoot when my son and I drove to Disney with two granddaughters in the back seat. My son picked “boy band” for the voice and every time it told us where to turn the girls would repeat it in the boy band voice and then giggle. I like it because it doesn’t seem to get pissed off when you miss a turn or decide to go a different way. Some of the older gps apps acted like they were mad at you when you did that.

The lady in the box does seem to get pissed. Recalculating, recalculating, you think I have nothing better to do than recalculate?...😤

[Ralphie ★]

1 hour ago, Airehead said:

The lady in the box does seem to get pissed. Recalculating, recalculating, you think I have nothing better to do than recalculate?...😤

  She does sound miffed.