Laptop GPS World

My apologies Marvin. You are right as usual! It was Maustin155 on July29th. Guess reading ALL the postings prior to writing mine muddled things. I only asked about the PPC format as it was mentioned earlier. Yes basically that was what I was asking tcassidy. Thanks for your response to both. I feel welcome!

Hi, I may have misunderstood your question, but if you are wondering if iGuidance allows you to route to a POI from your current position, the answer is YES. This is actually a pretty standard feature in most of the gps software and may be done in several ways. Both our Pocket PC and laptop/umpc/car PC versions work the same way on this feature.

1. From your current position, click on menu > destination > POI and select the POI to navigate to that POI

2. If you already have an existing route, clicking on destination > POI will automatically add and route to the selected POI as a stopover

3. If you activated the POI > custom screen, you may also display all the POI icons along your route on your screen. If your PC supports touchscreen (ex. UMPC, tablet PC, or Pocket PC), you may simply click on any POI icon on screen to view add'l information about that POI such as phone # AND directly tap "nav" to route to that POI. And when you zoom in at 100 and 200 ft level under 2D view, or level 1 and 2 zoom under 3D view, name/description of all the POIs on screen will also be displayed. If your PC doesn't support touchscreen, you may still accomplish the same by using your mouse/touch pad. However, please do NOT do this while you're driving.

Hope this answers your question.

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I don't think that's what fsthebook was referring to. I believe he means he wants to be able to route to a POI located directly on the current route in progress; as in a gas station, for example, located on one of the streets to be traveled between the GPS position and the destination. iGuidance is not capable of this. But it would be a fantastic feature to have.

Actually, iGuidance is capable of doing that as mentioned in item #3 in the previous post. When POI > custom is activated by the user, you'll see all the POI's of your choice on your screen including ones that are along or close to your route. And to route there, you simply tap on that POI icon directly on your map screen and select "nav". This works well if you are just looking for a gas station, hospital, ATM, or any restaurant, rest stop, etc. And if you set the zoom at 100/200 ft level (or level 1 & 2 in 3D view), you can see all the names of the POI on the map.

On the other hand, if you are referring to route to a "specific" POI along the route such as wanting to get to a Starbucks that's along the route and having the capability to see that directly on the screen and route there, then that's a different story.

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http://www.inavcorp.com

I was referring to routing to a specific POI along the pre-determined route, which iGuidance is not capable of doing. I believe that's what fsthebook was referring to also, routing to a specific POI along the route; not what you describe in item #3. Again, this would be a great feature to have. I believe MS Streets & Trips is the only software capable of doing this.

Oh, you mean "searching along a route", as opposed to searching around a location. No, iGuidance 2009 (and earlier versions) cannot perform a POI search along a route (but it would be a useful feature).

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Marvin Hlavac

Laptop GPS software reviews | Stores offering discounts to our members: Semsons & Co. Inc. and Deluo Electronics

Will the GPS receiver that came with my Microsoft Streets & Trips 2006 package work with iGuidance 2009? The receiver says on the back "GPS-500 SIRF III" if that helps any...

The Pharos 500 that comes with Streets & Trips is a standard NMEA GPS and will work with iGuidance.

Terry

This version have EUROPEAN map's?

European maps are not available for this product as far as I know.

Terry

Unfortunately not anymore. Few years ago iNav released version iGuidance 2.1 even for the European market, but the European distributor(s) didn't manage to sell enough copies of the product to justify future releases. That's a pity because the people who tried the EU version liked it. At leased the few I heard from.

Perhaps look into Garmin Mobile PC (with European maps). That's similar to what you would experience as a iGuidance user.

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Marvin Hlavac

Laptop GPS software reviews | Stores offering discounts to our members: Semsons & Co. Inc. and Deluo Electronics

Marvin, can you comment more on the usefullness of the traffic pattern feature after using it for a few months ? Do you find it better to leave the feature on or off ?

Hi ghytty,

to Laptop GPS World.

Hmm, that's a good question. I would love to hear other people comment on this one, too, because I think this very much depends on local data as well.

All previous versions of iGuidance have been, in my experience, very good at giving accurate ETA. I would trust iGuidance on ETA over any other software product. So I think it would be very difficult to improve on something that has always been this good.

Perhaps the only time when I would not trust ETA of any earlier version of iGuidance would be when going to downtown Toronto during the day. The traffic congestion slows everything just too much.

The new version promises to deal with this issue, but does it? When I turn on the feature, I see that during morning rush hour, or during afternoon rush hour, a few extra minutes are indeed added to the travel time in downtown Toronto - but a few minutes is not enough, because in real life the bad traffic adds much more than just a few minutes.

I suspect the historical data for my area is either not there at all, and the algorithm guesses this data, or the historical data is not accurate.

Another example of this would be our Hwy-407. This is a toll highway, and it actually is a very expensive toll highway. The traffic on this highway is just fine even during peak times. For some reason, though, iGuidance unnecessarily adds quite a bit of time to ETA during rush hour times even when travelling on this Hwy-407.

Long story short, going through downtown this new feature adds not enough minutes to ETA, but going through Hwy-407 the feature adds way too many minutes to ETA. That confuses things for me. I prefer to keep the new feature off, and my ETA is just fine. Occasionally, if I go downtown, I know I need to mentally add time to ETA, but other times I'm quite comfortable relying on iGuidance's ETA - even on several hour long trips.

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Marvin Hlavac

Laptop GPS software reviews | Stores offering discounts to our members: Semsons & Co. Inc. and Deluo Electronics