my brother was down from canada visiting over the weekend. so we got into a conversation about the best route back to his home base. we live in vermont, one of those border states. using the n800 and the navicore software i tried to put in his village town city and was told they couldn't find it. so i switched to the canada and alaska region from the eastern us region. wow, found the city right away, even the address. but when we attempted to plan the route? right, couldn't find the route. we weren't in canada yet, dorothy; navicore couldn't start navigating.

so we switched back to the eastern us. since we're on a major highway we figured it could probably find a large canadian city that was nearby and had a major highway leading to it. nope, couldn't find montreal.
i think navicore and nokia need to rethink their us/canada(/mexico?) marketing strategy.

we tried gnuite's maemo mapper. it was able to plot a us to canada route from one small city to another small city in about the wink of an eye, though downloading the maps to get there took a while longer. mm seemed to have the rout figured out before the maps were available.

my disappointment with navicore is growing. i dislike the need to open a whole new screen when attempting to type in the city name, or address or street number. and it peeves me the software doesn't start suggesting a city name as i start to type. it disturbs me the maps seem to be old. they changed the routing of a major city street in this little city a few years ago, but teleatlas and navicore still show the car leaving the 'old' road and driving through the middle of a field.

i am beginning to think the navicore software and teleatlas maps require more patience than i'm will to give them. especially when a little home brew piece of software from a writer who has barely enough time in a day for his real job, is able to develop something as sweet and usable as maemo mapper. i do like the more visible screen roads teleatlas developed, but i was impressed with the speed of gnuite's program. i do like the navicore selection of what sound like real humans, but the machine like voice of mm is able to read out both the current street and the street to be turned on to.

maybe i better check the list of gps receivers that work with the n800.

john