I have been playing with the various configuration settings for DMD2 for some time, my approach is probably the same as many others would get to know the app on a regular android phone before taking the plunge and investing in a dedicated unit.
Yesterday I finally took it out on the road for a test run. Until you do this, you have no idea how the software will perform.
At this point I want to say that I love the concept of DMD2, I very rarely ride off-road, but the flexibility of a highly customizable interface for a navigation device with the ability to also support many mobile device applications is very appealing, especially since you can try it out on a regular cell phone at minimal cost.
I also understand and accept that this is still a development product in many respects and so many refinements may still be in the development backlog.
My comments here are very relevant to normal road use and I would expect the problems I encountered are not so much of an issue when riding off-road.
- Specifically, to the points made by the original post; travelling at a reasonable speed on unfamiliar roads and busy traffic DMD2 was almost unusable, there was little to no forward warning when lane changes are necessary for upcoming turns, the small window displayed on the left in map view gave some information but wasn’t relevant to any upcoming turns. We were lucky to change lanes but had to make U-turns frequently after missing a lane change or turn.
- The Left/Right onscreen indicator was often incorrect. I presume the small on-screen bar that slowly diminishes is an indication of an upcoming junction or lane change, but it was difficult to understand.
- The voice turn-by-turn instructions may have made up for the above-mentioned items but was so quiet it was difficult to understand. We spent some time experimenting with the device config but could not increase the volume. The same applies to the DMD2 settings interfaces, we could not find any way to adjust this.
- Finally, there was one intersection that completely confused the map software such that we eventually had to give up and switch to Google Maps to finish our journey
- All of the above may have been avoided if you can select an external app like Google Maps – I was able to use Google Maps to navigate to the start of the planned route, but I could not find how to use Google Maps for the planned route (There may be a way to accomplish this that I could not find).
I am not sure if the problems encountered would have been less impactful to our experience in an offroad situation, but the last problem we experienced was the fact that when missing a turn, the software could not navigate back to the planned route.
I truly hope that many of the functionality and features that we see in mainstream navigational apps are backlog features or functionality that are planned and/or are dependent upon other changes coming down the line, I fully understand that developing such an application takes time and look forwards to ongoing revisions,
