[BzsBimmer]

Originally Posted by BK

This is a very old thread so I wasn’t going to reply, but what the heck.

I’ve had my car for a couple of weeks now, and I previously used various Garmin portable nav units for several years. The Garmin units are about as good as it gets for portable nav units. I have also used the nav in the Lexus, and tested it in the TL, Honda, VW, and Mazda.

IMO, the nav in the Bimmer is a Jekyll and Hyde: excellent if you know the address where you are going, and all but useless if you don’t.

If you do know the address: using the iDrive controller is not as good as a touch screen, but I can put up with it. You can also use voice to enter address info. Once you enter the address, the route is generated fairly quickly, the graphics are excellent, the screen refresh is quick, I love the dead reckoning ability (something you miss with a portable nav), the map info is very much up to date in the DC area, and the voice prompts are about as good as any nav unit I have ever used.

What about when you don’t know the address? Good luck finding where you want to go. Yes, there are plenty of times when you need to “find nearest fast food” or “find nearest gas station,” and the nav works well for that, but what about “go to the Best Buy in Rockville MD”? You have to say (going from memory here, so this may not be exactly correct) Navigation (click)>Information (click)>On new location (click)>scroll up to the city of your last search (click)>uh oh, since I live in VA, my last search was a city in VA, now I need to change the state to MD... I click on VA... then I scroll through a list of all 50 states, stop at MD, then click again>okay, now we are in MD, I scroll back down to city again (click)>type in Rockville (click)>okay, now I have a list of POI categories... I pick Banking & Shopping (click)>uh oh, another list of several subcategories... hmmm, would it be under “gifts and merchandise”? Yes, I think so... but wait, could it be under “general”? Yes, maybe that is where it would be (click)>a pause, then a list of stores comes up, sorted by distance to the geographic center of Rockville MD... are you kidding me? Should I scroll through these hundreds of stores to see if “Best Buy” jumps out at me? They aren't in alphabetical order. Maybe I should just go back and click on “gifts and merchandise”? Useless. Absolutely useless.

Compare this to a typical GPS unit procedure to find the Best Buy in Rockville. Click on “find”>click on “by name”>type “Best Buy.” A list of all Best Buy locations in the US (or however you want to limit the search), sorted by closest to furthest, comes up. Pick the one in Rockville.

BMW nav disks have all the info they need to make the search function work that way. Instead, they essentially decided to make it not work at all.

If I could order my car all over again, would I get iDrive? Yes, no question about it. Besides being an excellent interface for Bluetooth phone, stereo, service information, etc., the nav works great when I have an address, and I am a big fan of having a "scrolling map" with me as I drive even when I know where I am going. But the nav search/POI function needs to be made useful.

Yeah this was an old (and I mean OLD) post but it was bumped back to popular demand I guess.
I'm with you BK and I couldn't have said it better. It's VERY annoying especially if you have NO idea what the town that the Best Buy is in! I hope someone from BMW is reading these posts regarding POI's.

[LarryK1000]

I agree with Corporal. I've had computers since 1976 and have both current G5 Macs and PC's. I'm VERY computer literate.

The iDrive system is very cumbersome and not intuitive at all. It takes multiple steps to do simple things.

Just getting the car to show the FM or Satellite Menu you were on when you turned off the car requires several steps and waiting for the iDrive system to boot up.

I like the speed of the Navigation system, but my Magellan RoadMate 800 is just GREAT and outshines the BMW system. In fact, if BMW were smart, it would license Magellan software and put its system in the right hand Assist Window, which is bigger than the RoadMate screens, and it would be perfect.

The biggest drawback of the BMW Nav system is that you CANNOT search by NAME of a place. Example, I wanted to find a Baskin and Robbins Ice Cream Store in Simi Valley, California. On the RoadMate, you just type in Baskin and it will search for the closest place with Baskin in it. It's fantastic. With the BMW system, you either have to find the address of the place from a phone book or phone call or move the Nav screen to the approximate place you are going and ask it to find restaurants. I'm not even sure it has ice cream parlors. And, once it gives you the restaurants, it's just a list. It could have 100 names on it. Is absolutely useless to search for something unless it's a major thing like an Airport or Disneyland.

I'm still glad I got iDrive for the other functions -- but Navigation is NOT a reason to buy it.

MP3 Correction: The iDrive system DOES play MP3's from the dashboard CD player. And, if you remove the Nav DVD, you can also play a MP3 DVD. That will hold 4.3 GB of songs. And, you can see the folder structure of the folders on the CD or DVD right on the iDrive screen. Works great. You have this capability with the newer software. My build date is April 10 of this year. So, older cars, may not have this MP3 capability.

Oh, and Non-iDrive cars can ALSO play the MP3 CD's in the in dash CD player -- I tried it on my friend's 325.

Larry

[London320d]

Originally Posted by LarryK1000

....
Just getting the car to show the FM or Satellite Menu you were on when you turned off the car requires several steps and waiting for the iDrive system to boot up.
..

The system rembers where you were on each of the four main menu headings. Just hold the controller in the required direction for a few seconds and you're back on the same screen you left that section on. ie. holding controller to the right for 3 seconds switches the map display rather than the nav menu, if you previously had a map displayed.

Yes iDrive could be a bit more intuitive, and does not have some of the bells and whiltles of recent handheld nav units, however as a nav device it works very well, the display is excellent, it does not need to be assembled each time it is used, and has dead reconing which impoves the accuracy of the cars idea of its position/direction.

[garethpeate]

I like iDrive, and I think it gets a lot more bad press than it deserves. It's cumbersome but not to the point where it becomes an inconvenience to use. Everything important can be operated via hardware on the console or steering wheel anyway.

Personally, the look and feel could do with a bit of an overhaul now, and navigating around parts of a screen is fine for me, but confuses the hell out of my parents (quite amusing sometimes). There just seems to be a delay between moving the controller and getting a response. Maybe a faster CPU would be the answer... I dunno.

My only real criticism is that very occasionally our iDrive tends to 'forget' things when the car starts up (such as what commands are assigned to the star and rhombus buttons, what radio station was on, climate settings, etc), or sometimes it'll just take ages to start up and initalise.

But that's hardly a reason to hate it.

Just take a look inside a car that doesn't use the knob & screen interface, like a Jaguar, and see how much tidier the interior of the BMW looks and all is forgiven