kag's tech blog

A few days ago, my girlfriend and I planned to go on a small trip to Montréal. I had only been there a few times, and only had to drive there twice. I’ve never had a chance to play with a GPS, so I thought it would be cool to create myself a need (!) and ask my boss if I could borrow his. The next day, I had his Garmin StreetPilot c550 on my desk.

It’s a little big compared to the new units, but it’s been out for a while now. It has a very nice touch screen display and was perfectly readable in the sun, which impressed me. I just read in the specs that it is supposed to speak street names, but it never did while I used it.

I plugged it in my car on the way home and I found myself laughing all alone in my car just hearing that little machine talking to me and telling me where to turn. It found my address without any problem, but it gave me the directions of the shortest road, not the quickest one. As soon as it noticed I was not taking the suggested road, it recalculated another path based on my new location and direction. It recalculated a new path a few times since I kept driving on my favorite road. I was afraid it would just say “alright, if you don’t want to listen to me, I’ll just shut down”, but fortunately it didn’t.

So when we left for Montréal a few days later, I input the address of the restaurent we wanted to try. I had to choose the province, enter the city, the civic number and as soon as I entered the first few characters of the street name, it displayed a list of 3 potential streets. Easy enough, but I would have liked a QWERTY keyboard instead of an alphabetical one.

In addition of the map itself, it displayed an approximation of the arrival time and the distance until the next turn. If you click on the distance, a small dashboard will appear with your current speed (I found out that at 120 km/h on my car, I’m actually doing 115 km/h), the remaining distance, the top speed (I didn’t try how high it would go…) and a bunch of other information that I didn’t find particulary interesting. You could also get a list of all the upcoming turns, but I found this useless since it’s going to tell you where to turn anyway.

I was actually surprised by the vocabulary this little thing had! It would tell basic information such as “turn right in 100 meters” or “keep left”, but I was amazed when it told me to “enter the roundabout and take the second exit on the left”. I’m not very good at guessing distances, so it happened a few times where it would say “turn right in 200 meters” so I would visually identify an upcoming intersection and prepare myself to turn there, but the street where it actually wanted me to turn was just before, a bit hidden between parked cars. It would say “turn right” while I’m doing 50 km/h and I would have to jump on the brakes to make it. Unconsciously, I expected it to tell me I was going too fast and slow down now because the next turn is really close.

When I turned on the GPS in a street where there were a lot of tall buildings (downtown Montréal), it would litteraly take more than 5 minutes to get a GPS signal. I would have to drive around and try to find a more open street. Sometimes it was confused for a few minutes even after picking a signal.

We then decided to go where we were staying for the night, but before getting there we thought it would be nice to buy a bottle of wine for our friend there. We looked up for “SAQ” (it’s a liquor store) and found one nearby. It asked us if we wanted to get to our destination after passing by the SAQ, which we did. But the way it was asked didn’t make it clear that choosing No would have set SAQ as the new final destination.

One thing that made me laugh was the fact that this machine has no notion of stopping and turning around (which I can understand). On the way back to Québec, I needed to use the restroom so I took an exit on a country road where there was a garage not too far. As soon as it noticed I was not on the highway anymore (and thought I had taken a wrong turn), it recalculated a new path. But since there was only one road, it told me to drive 5-10 km and take a few streets over there that would basically head me back for the highway. Instead, I stopped at the garage right there, and as I went back on the road towards the highway, it recalculated my position again and understood I didn’t have to go back 10 km to turn around anymore.

While I’m amazed by the huge database it had, it’s not perfect. We wanted to visit some family so we lookup for Osias street. It would not find it until we tried to spell it another way. It ended up working with Ozias, which was the correct spelling, but I would have expected it to come up with a few suggestions when it could not find Osias. Another argument for this missing feature is the fact that this street it sometimes spelled as Ozias and sometimes as Osias. Since we’re not familiar with that area, we were lucky to try get it right while trying some alternative spellings.

When I dropped my girlfriend in Trois-Rivières, we input Deblois as the street name. It made us take an exit ahead of the one we usually do. We thought we would give it a try, maybe that alternative road would be quicker than our usual one. Instead, we ended up in a street that was not named Deblois at all, and was not near the one we were looking for. Fortunately, my girlfriend knows Trois-Rivières well so we were able to find our way without any problem. When we got there though, we noticed that the street was actually named “De blois” (in two words). This was the only major bug we had with the unit.

In the end, we both thought this was a super cool machine! But since it rarely happens that we go a place we don’t at all, I don’t think it would be a good investment for now.