Last week I had to travel to Los Angeles for two days of meetings. I opted to use my iPhone as my GPS navigation unit, rather than pay the extra money for the Rental Car Companies Nav Unit. On the first day of meetings, I landed in LAX and had to drive north in the morning and eventually make my way down to Orange County in the evening, for the following day’s meetings.
POSITIVE: After a bit of tapping on the screen, the iPhone performed well at giving me accurate directions, traffic information and approximate drive times. Each and every address combined with clicking “Current Location” always gave me directions that I could follow.
NEGATIVE: Fumbling with typing an exact address takes a little while, but best to be accurate. I’m still not a fan of the auto-correction feature. I forgot to bring some kind of suction cup mounting thingie, so I set my iPhone on my lap and picked it up after reaching the next waypoint on my journey. With the “No Texting” Law in effect in California, I had to be particularly careful not to appear that I was texting or talking while driving.
REALLY NEGATIVE: After 12 hours of consistent use of the Navigation and sending and receiving email, the battery was almost dead. My bet is that the GPS and mapping tends to drain to battery quite a bit. I’m also sure that the constant switching between EDGE and 3G while traversing Los Angeles and Orange County also adds to the battery drain.
DAY TWO: With a second day of meetings, I tried to manage the battery life of my iPhone a bit better. One trick that I used to conserve battery power was to click the Power button on the top on the iPhone after I looked at the next set of directions to follow. Since the little blue dot did not have to track my location against the Google Map, that probably helped. I also switched to List View instead of Map View which also helped to save some energy.
TAKEAWAY: I should bring my cigarette plug for my iPhone, the next time I have to do some serious all day driving with meetings, or for any roadtrip for that matter.
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I wonder how that would deal with the new laws in Ontario which do not allow you to use any electronic hand held device while driving (including mp3 players and phones) with the one exception of a gps mounted to the dash or windsheild. Does that make it a GPS or a phone by our lovely new legal standards?
masini de inchiriat
odelle: Good point. Are you violating the law if you get a phone call while looking at your iPhone giving you directions while driving?
odelle: Good point. Are you violating the law if you get a phone call while looking at your iPhone giving you directions while driving?