My mini-review on Iguidance 2.0

gizak · 03-14-2005, 09:57 AM

Great piece of software, although I have nothing to compare it to except microsoft's stuff. For the most part, it works great. I did have a few areas where it showed, and announced the right street, but wrong direction - BUT the visual highlighted street was the correct way. Very odd, will have to do more testing with this. It does have good, quick re-routing on my PPC. What I wish it has was a more options for "destinations".

1. Favorites - sorts it alphabetically only. Once your favorties gets to be quite large, you'd probably want your most frequently used ones at the top right? Scrolling down sucks.

2. Editing Favorites - I can edit the name of the entry but not the address??? That's the most important part!! Instead, I have to delete the whole entry and create a new one, blah.

3. Address - when entering this in, it gives you multiple screens asking "Input Methods" of going street first (if you are already in that city), or city first. It then asks for street name, and then a valid number range, etc. It works, but sometimes I just want to enter in the address as it would show up on an envelope or how you would enter it into google maps/yahoo maps, etc: address, city, state zip. One entry screen = Easy.

4. POI: not bad, not bad...but I liked Microsoft's plain and simple method of just doing a search on a restaurant name, or company name and having it bring up all of those with x miles of my current position (I'd also like to be able to search my favorites if it gets too big!). Right now I don't even get a chance to do that (at least with restaurants). What if I'm craving taco bell and want to know where the closest one is? Iguidance 2.0's only method of finding restaurants is by genre. So you can have all the mexican food places show all these POI icons on the map and I then gotta go clicking on all of them to see if that's even a Taco bell. Too tedious, not direct enough.

5. Bonus idea: Being able to create favorites is nice. What would be cool is if you can have all your saved favorites show up on the map as POI. You'd be able to see all your friend's houses on a map and plan out your carpool path depending on where you are at and who's house to go to first. This could be expanded to have anything. Say for instance you love Starbuck's coffee, and you'd like every starbuck's coffee in your state to always show up on your screen. You could add it to a "POI Favorite's Group" that you can toggle on so that you know when one is nearby as you drive around. Or maybe you always get Arco gas (cause it's cheaper) so you want to know where all these gas stations are when you are low.

For the price, it's worth it. As with news, the bad things always stand out, but don't let these little things prevent you from getting it if you are still in the market for some GPS software. This is just mostly a rant, take a look at the good reviews out there to find out what I did like about Iguidance 2.0 hehe.