Where Do You Want To Go Today? Let OnCourse Guide You!

The Program

After activation, there is a very short (7 page) introduction that you view to start off. Of course, I skipped that…big mistake! Fortunately, you can see it anytime from the settings menu. I recommend that you do view it because it gives you a very quick basic overview but more importantly, you won’t make the same mistake I made. For me, page 7 was the most important and if I had read it, I would have saved myself a lot of aggravation in trying to access a feature I wanted but couldn’t figure out how to get!

Of course I was really psyched to try this new navigation package so I enabled the Bluetooth receiver and immediately started to run the software (NOTE: With the Automatic detection feature,  it accurately detected the com port and baud rate of the Bluetooth receiver.  My GPS setting was automatically configured and saved for all subsequent use).

The opening navigation screen gave me eight buttons and 4 icons to start my navigation. The buttons were for Navigation, Home, Voice Recognition, Favorites, Recent Destinations, Map, Settings and Quit. The icons were for a TMC Receiver (not available in the US yet), GPS Status, Logbook and a Windows icon.

Pressing Navigation, a screen appeared that allowed me to pick a region and enter an address. There were two buttons for Points of Interest and two additional icons appeared at the bottom of the screen (previous page and opening page). Clicking on address, a screen appeared where I could enter zip code, city, street, number and even intersection. The option to Show it on a map, Save it or Start Navigation was at the bottom. Of course I chose Start Navigation where the program immediately calculated the route. I was impressed with its speed although it was a very simple and short distance. There will be many more tests to see just how fast it is.

As soon as the route was calculated, a screen appeared in 14 seconds with the route displayed. The display was zoomed in and there were indicators telling me where I was, what street I was to take the next turn on, the distance I needed to go to take the turn, anticipated time of arrival with the time for the trip and the total distance of 28 miles to travel. In addition, once the map was displayed, the return icons (for the previous page and the first page) were replaced with the word INFO. Pressing on this gives a very pleasant woman’s voice telling you the next turn.

There was an icon in the upper right that when pressed changed the view from full screen to a smaller screen surrounded by 7 items to choose from: A Hand to move the map, North Up, GPS current position, 3D view, the icon to display or not display these icons, Beginning to End of trip and a Zoom in/out bar. I spent quite a bit of time playing with these controls and was quite pleased with their function and ease of use.

With any new program, spending the time “playing” with its interface to get a through understanding of how it works is important. I was really pleased with the overall performance of the program especially because I could find a place that I wanted to get to rather quickly. It was a very short learning curve and pretty much intuitive but I just could not figure out one thing.

I like the ability to go back and use Recent Destinations so you did not have to re-input the information and I liked the ease of saving a destination so it would appear in Favorites folder. A great feature when you save it is that you have an option for adding a Voice Tag for easy retrieval while driving. What a terrific feature!