email 2 ViaMichelin - v3.51 is so awful I am back on v2.52

[jblackmore]

Wonder if anyone else has anything to add or disagree with in this:

Dear ViaMichelin,

I thought I should contact you as I upgraded to Mapsonic v3.51 using your free download feature recently, and found your new version so awkward and irritating to use that I have been forced to go back to your old v2.52 software.

Please can you pass this to your developers so they can properly read and understand these points, and not just send your standard support reply which will not be helpful in this case - I am not looking for assistance, I am trying to give you useful feedback on your product.

I am using a Palm Zire 31 which I bought as a Kirrio bundle with your software and GPS reciever/car kit, and manage to run with 10.3Mb free memory by using SD card for all maps, and also deleting the unused language.xml files from internal memory (all except ENGLISH which I use).

Specifically the points which I found annoying in v3.51 which you might like to look into fixing are:

1. Menu system is very annoying, unless you are simply navigating to a known location, it is slow and frustrating ,the old menu system took some time to learn, but once mastered it was very quick to use.

2. selecting a POI searches for about 20 seconds, despite their only being 2 POIs in that category !!

3. night mode (which I have to use all the time due to the Zire31 STN screen) no longer changes the menu colours so the menus are invisible !

4. distance to destination seems to be completely random, on a 40 minute drive yesterday it started at 1hr45 mins, and then changed half way through the journey from 1hr25mins to 7 mins in about 30 seconds !!

5. POI management - which was THE best feature of Mapsonic v2.5 is now impossible - finding/deleting a POI used to be a simple and quick 2 step operation (centre place -> poi -> hold stylus on POI and select delete), it is now awkward and non-intuitive to do this at all and if there are two POIs close together it appears to be impossible to delete either of them as your software doesn't show them, so you cannot select one to then go map options -> location indicator -> delete address and it seems to be impossible to remove.

6. Your postcode handling is useless, unless you can accept a full postcode and house number then there is no point in using partial postcode to select an area (often incorrectly - which is very annoying, as there is no way of enlarging the search region once partial postcode has been accepted), which then requires street name as well - perhaps you should add full postcode support to your PC software, and add proper hotsync of POI's between PC and PDA, as this would provide most people with a usable postcode solution - I am used to finding locations on the pda by area/roadname/number and if I can't find the exact house number, I can scroll around the map to find it (using a internet website such as multimap.co.uk if needed), and add a POI at my target address ,which I can then navigate to easily later.

I understand you are trying to copy the TomTom Go interface look and feel, and obviously due to copyright/trademark/legal issues you cannot actually do this, but your compromise is unworkable, and you need to either add the old menus on top of the new interface so users have the choice of both ways to access features (which should be very simple to do, as the functionality under both UI's should be the same), or you will simply fail to complete with TomTom and your other competitors.

The best feature and selling point of MapSonic should be the POI management, which in 2.52 is excellent, and for speed camera etc warning, which is a major feature for GPS buyers, you should focus on maintaining and improving the POI features to keep customers.

Also, your installation sofware should ask for languages you would like to have and only install them, as it is a waste of precious internal memory to install all languages when I expect 99% of your users will only use one of them !

Hope this is useful information, I will not upgrade back to v3.5x so will continue to use v2.52 until I decide to spend the money on a dedicated GPS system - probably TomTom Go X00 in a couple of years time !

James.

[jblackmore]

Can't believe I forgot the alphabetic keypad !!!

I love the fact that the rest of the world uses Qwerty but ViaMichelin are trying to buck the trend :-)

Just been playing with v2.52 and its a dream in comparison !

If anyone on v2.52 thinks they find it annoying, swap to v3.51 for a weekend, and you will realise v2.52 is perfection in comparison :-)

[iancjc]

not wanting to down play your problems but I think it would be helpful if you complained about version 3.1 - there is no 3.51 .

I guess this may confuse viamichelin as well.

For the record my wife is very happy with 3.1 on her tungsten e - I've used tomtom for the past 3 years and can't say I'm super impressed with mapsonic but it has got me to places when I have used it and is rock solid on her palm.
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TyTn II (WM6.1) / tomtom one v2
TTN6.03 tomtom 7.xx (one)

[martike]

I think your list of complaints is comprehensive and accurate. It illustrates that this particular upgrade was in fact a downgrade in terms of quality of the software and interface.

Some additional comments from my own experience :

Documentation for the version 3 release is an incomplete user manual which is available for download under the title “Installation Manual”. A major new release requires a complete new manual, and there isn’t one. The website says it’s installed along with version 3, but it isn’t.

Yes, you should add the awful keypad to your list. Ideally there should be a choice of azerty or querty, but not just a straight alphabetic sequence.

Text size. In the POI handling the font is very much larger than previously, but on the navigation display, where it really matters, it’s still quite small (time and distance to destination, for example).

Scroll bars are no longer available. Previously there were window-style scroll bars (for example in the detailed listing of a route), but now there are just two arrows, so scrolling can only be done in jumps.

Some functions have disappeared completely (for example, “unselect” which cleaned your current map).

Still no waypoints, which must be the biggest missing feature on this package.

Others on this board have also mentioned some other points :

No longer possible to be in navigation mode without a route set. I hope I have this right because I haven’t observed this myself. Apparently this makes speed camera spotting difficult.

Of course, writing to Michelin about this will make you feel better, but will it really make any difference ? My experience with contacting them (both in writing and by phone to their helpdesk) has been that they really have no interest in either your problems or your feedback.

[jblackmore]

Waypoints is a difficult one, as it is awkward to implement, and could lead to very long route calculation times.

I suspect that the same companies who produce the engines for route calculation for domestic sat navs are also selling vastly more expensive systems to courier and freight companies to manage delivery runs (travelling salesman problem of a bunch of addresses and you want the shortest route covering all of them),and clearly if the domestic systems offered multi-destination routing, this might complicate things.

One of the things which annoys me is why the route calculation can't be done in background, ie if I am travelling from my house to somewhere in Scotland, then it shouldn't take more than 2 seconds to realise that is going to be via the motorway, so it should immediately start directing me to motorway, and then 2 minutes later the distance/time etc could be populated.

It seems to me the routeplanning is done on a iterative basis trying every road to check shortest/quickest, when actually it should use 'waypoints' with pre-calculated routes between them, a few hundred of these would vastly accelerate the route calc time, and then fine tuning could be done in background en-route, without the user even realising !!

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