Frequently the Navi on my 04 TL has a pregnant pause during address input. I begin entering the street or house number and the system pauses, almost locking up, during the process. After a few seconds it frees up and returns to normal. I am fairly certain that it is a software problem.

I showed it to a tech today and he agreed. Since there aren't any current updates, we just have to live with it.

My other biggest turnoffs are:

1) The lack of a back button. You input all the information on many screens and find out that you needed to change an input and you're only option is to start over.

2) No current location intelligence for searches. You're looking for a Burger King in Seattle and your choices for that specific title begin with locations in other parts of the US…

3) Finally databases functionally unsearchable. In the above example Burger King is not the needed restaurant title in Seattle. There hasn't been any effort to consolidate names into usable groupings. This is a monster task but for a GPS, and especially in light of weakness number 2, this is a real drawback.

Kaps

 

1) Actually, pressing CANCEL often brings you to the previous screen.
2) If you search by closest proximity (there's an option for that), it'll show you the closest Burger Kings. I did it this weekend with Harvey's.
3) Dunno about that. That would probably be up to the company that builds the database (in this case Alpine).

 

If these long pauses are a new thing, perhaps your DVD is dirty and it's having read errors. Regarding your other points...

1. Yes, there is. Press "Cancel" on the console or "Back" on the steering wheel to move back a step.

2. You can find nearest anything by choosing the "Distance to Travel" option. If, however, you're describing the way it won't do fuzzy searches, I agree. I've tried to find Starbucks, for example, and had to try "Starbuck," "Starbucks," and "Starbuck's" to find it near me. I do have better results, though, searching by keyword instead of name.

3. I think I covered this in the second part of number 2 above. Try searching by keyword and distance to travel. You may get what you're looking for that way.

 

Wow, thanks for the excellent feedback!

Have either of you experenced the pausing problem?

Kaps

 

I haven't noticed it pausing, but it wouldn't surprise me if it was waiting on the DVD drive for some reason. I don't know how it works specifically, but I can imagine that the drive spins down when it's not being accessed and some stuff sits in RAM. When you navigate the menus, it feeds from RAM until you ask it something it needs to hit the disc for. It will then pause while it spins up the disc, seeks the data, and finally reads it. If I notice a pause, I'd expect it to be due to that scenario.

 

I can understand a pause during DVD access, like you suggest but in the middle of entering an address! Like you can enter a house number like 12345 and it will pause between two on the numbers like after the 4 you have to wait to enter the 5.

Kaps