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Posted: Thu Mar 03, 2011 4:46 am Post subject: Nuvi St-Ste-Saint-Sainte Search -- Sarmin Has NO Soul
This is so frustrating. Every time it comes to searching for a city or street that begins with Saint or Ile, I need to guess what spellling is used or even if it's abreviated. What a PITA.
I e-mailed Garmin Support,
Subject: City and Street Search
Quote:
Message: I'm a 250W owner and at times extremely frustrated with the search function of cities. If not spelled correctly it finds NO RESULTS. I live in Quebec Canada and many of our cities have hyphens apostrophes or the prefix Saint. Example: I'm trying to find Saint Jovite Quebec. There are too many combinations: St Jovite Ste Jovite Saint Jovite Sainte Jovite St-Jovite Ste-Jovite Saint-Jovite Sainte-Jovite.... You get the picture !!!!! Further problems with L'Ile Isle L'Isle Ile. Do you have a product that does partial searches from the middle of the word or even the city name without all the prefixes or hyphens let me know and I would be a happy customer. As it stands now I'm in the market for a new GPS but this issue is a major one. I am not happy with my current GPS.
They replied
Quote:
Thank you for contacting Garmin International. I would be glad to assist you with your imputing city names issues. based on your email when typing in a specific it does give you the option when you get to the enter city screen to search all. This is what I would recommend with your situation. If you have any additional questions or concerns please feel free to email us back
I replied.
Quote:
Dear Cody
I found your solution amusing to say the least. I suppose that not being a resident of a francophone region you don't quite comprehend the seriousness of the problem at hand.
Our streets as well as cities have names with prefixes and/or hyphens. Furthermore I may just want to find a city alone.
If I may offer some solutions.
1: You already have an search within "Extra POI's" that allows a partial word search within a word. Example if I type "VERSI" I get "uniVERSIty", "diVERSIty", "reVERSIng" and "VERSIon". You could incorporate this kind of search to your streets and cities.
2: Drop those hyphens !!!!! Especially when searching. Let a persons type the name with out hyphens. You can leave the spelling of the name as is, just don't include hyphens in the search. Have you tried going back and forth in the key menu between letters and punctuations? It's a major pain in the ***.
3: When searching a name with a prefix, include all the different spellings. Example: If I type "St. Catherine" any combination of the name should appear. Such as: St. Catherine, Ste. Catherine, Saint Catherine, Sainte Catherine, St.-Catherine, Ste.-Catherine, Saint-Catherine or Sainte-Catherine.
4: Better yet. Drop all prefixes from a search. In English we say "Magdalen Islands" but in french it's "Îles de la Madeleine" . Just drop the "Îles de la" part in your search.
5: Add an *asterisk* to your search function to signify "all". Like a DOS search. * Madeleine or * Catherine
6: For gods sake DROP THE HYPHENS in the search
I implore you to try the following. Select province of Quebec for a city search. Type/Search each of the following one at a time. "St" and "Saint" then scroll down to find the different spellings.
I totally resent that you brushed this aside like my name was Oliver Twist and I was asking for a "a little more". I found your solution belittling. If you check some of the GPS forums you would find that I'm not alone in this dilemma.
Do I need to carry a paper map to double check the proper prefix of the city? Or buy a smart-phone so I can Google the name?
Bottom line is, I will not buy another Garmin product nor recommend one to any friends without some kind of fix to this issue. If you have any wish to satisfy the needs of a customer, not just this but many others, you should take this seriously and remedy the search problem.
What's ironic is that I like your product but this search issue is definitely a deal breaker.
So I went to the local electronics store and shopped for a new GPS and the TomTom has exactly the type of search I find useful. Completely blows away the Garmin search.
The problem is I hate the interface of the TT. It just sucks.
I like most everything about using my Garmin Nuvi & Explore and mapsource is pretty cool but this Saint, Ile and mostly those darn hyphens drive me nuts.
What is the problem with Garmin that they can't get with a 21st century type of search.
Joined: 24/06/2003 00:22:12 Posts: 2946 Location: Escaped to the Antipodies! 36.83°S 174.75°E
Posted: Thu Mar 03, 2011 6:35 pm Post subject: Re: Nuvi St-Ste-Saint-Sainte Search -- Sarmin Has NO Soul
rocknice2 wrote:
I live in Quebec Canada and many of our cities have hyphens apostrophes or the prefix Saint. Example: I'm trying to find Saint Jovite Quebec. There are too many combinations: St Jovite Ste Jovite Saint Jovite Sainte Jovite St-Jovite Ste-Jovite Saint-Jovite Sainte-Jovite....
If I type "St. Catherine" any combination of the name should appear. Such as: St. Catherine, Ste. Catherine, Saint Catherine, Sainte Catherine, St.-Catherine, Ste.-Catherine, Saint-Catherine or Sainte-Catherine.
Does it not work as expected if you just search for "Jovite" or "Catherine" then? _________________ Gone fishing!
Posted: Thu Mar 03, 2011 11:00 pm Post subject: Re: Nuvi St-Ste-Saint-Sainte Search -- Sarmin Has NO Soul
Skippy wrote:
Does it not work as expected if you just search for "Jovite" or "Catherine" then?
That's right! Not only do you need to figure out the correct spelling for Saint(e) but it may be abbreviated and/or hyphenated.
I just got an e-mail from Garmin support.
Quote:
Thank you for contacting Garmin International.
I'll be happy to help you with this. I apologize that you did not receive a timely response to your previous e-mail. We are continuously try to find ways to improve our products. The changes that you are inquiring about may be something that happens in the future but as of now the only way to search for a city is to type it in exactly.
I understand that there are many different brands of GPS' on the market and while we would like for you to continue to be a Garmin customer I understand that you need to have a GPS unit that works best for you. If you can find a GPS unit that suites your needs please purchase it even if that means buying a unit other than Garmin.
Basically it's not something that's going to attract new customers because they will search something they could find and they will also be dazzled by smoke and mirrors, I'm speaking of the useless 3D buildings and mountains. Nice but useless.[/b]
Posted: Sat Apr 23, 2011 11:29 am Post subject: Nuvi St-Ste-Saint-Sainte Search -- Sarmin Has NO Soul
I can sympathise with Rocknice2, but there several puzzling aspects to this.
I'm a Brit but have travelled regularly in France for many years, using sat navs since the first VDO Dayton CD-based setups and later VDO Dayton portables (all of which were excellent on searches). Now Garmin sales are strong in France, so how do the French manage? I have searched the French Google (www.google.fr) and one or two of their GPS-related forums and found no mention of the problems identified by Rocknice.
I now use a Garmin Nuvi 1490T in France and do not quite seem to have the problems encountered by our Quebecois cousins. If I want, for example, St. Amand-de-Coly I hit Cities and can enter Saint Amand or just something like Saint Am -- so long as I enter a 'left-most characters' string then the place will appear in the droplist. It will not however accept a 'mid string' of characters such as just Amand and this is what Rocknice2 found. So long as you remember this however there is no real problem.
Two points do arise:-
1. You have to enter Saint or Sainte in full -- it will not accept abbreviations St/Ste even though these normally appear on maps etc.
2. You omit the hyphens, although the result comes up hyphenated. One of Rocknice2's major criticisms does not appear to apply in France.
I wonder if this is a matter of mapping rather than software -- Rocknice2 no doubt has the North American mapping, whereas I of course (and the French) have the all-Europe map. European and N American 1490Ts thus seem to behave differently.
A minor irritation is that many 'saint' place names are repeated across France, so you need to know the neame of the département as well. The droplist does not give you the name, but only the département's two-digit identifier code (which appears on vehicle number plates and forms the first two digits of postcodes for those parts). This means that you need to know either the postcode of your destination town or have a list of the codes handy. 75 for example is Paris. All the VDO Dayton systems gave you the name.
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