BMW Nav 111

Got one, paid full whack, €1,700 including the bracket, the cables, the BMW 4-button mount and the GPS. Went to Tuscany in Italy with the speak option enabled through my Autocom to the helmet. Unbelievably efficient, had no time to read manuals, just bolted in on at the shipyard, and worked it intuitively from there .... a doddle, and it only got mixed up once at the top of a mountain pass in the Italian alps ... fantastic piece of kit. No that i'm home, i wish Garmin would issue the maps to cover all of Ireland!!!
Gaz

Hi Gaz, I have been looking at this pricey bit of kit but you raise some doubts in my mind if the whole of Ireland isnt covered. What sort of areas have they missed off the data ?

Hi Martin:

Eire is kind of complicated to map. It's not a Garmin issue - Garmin doesn't make maps, they buy their cartography from Navteq. Anyway, the story is this: It seems that the Government of Ireland has no electronic data that shows the roads in the country... and no plans to produce any. This means that the cartography companies (Navteq, TeleAtlas, et al) will have to create the vector mapping data themselves, which they are slowly doing. But, obviously, they are concentrating their efforts on the populated bits of the country (Dublin, for example), and it might be a long time - years and years - before the whole country is mapped.

By comparison, some European countries - for example, Switzerland - had the whole country mapped in vector format, right down to the cow paths, before Navteq even came knocking on the door back in the mid 1990s. That's great so far as convenience is concerned, however, it also explains why the GPSRs are so darn expensive in Europe. In North America, the governments of Canada and the USA put the electronic vector cartography into the public domain, so it costs Navteq nothing to acquire the basic data - although they do spend a lot of money adding detail to it. In Europe, Navteq has to buy the data from all the different governments - I think about 25 different ones at last count. It doesn't come cheap - the governments charge royalties on every CD sold.

If you have a European GPSR, and want to buy the CD with the North American data, it costs about $150 or so. If you have a North American GPSR, and want to buy the European maps, it costs about $550. That's entirely due to the royalties paid to the various governments in Europe.

Michael

Bmw nav 3

Hi Michael do you know if the mp3 player (like the 2820) is a function that could be activated on the nav 3 in the future ?

Thanks Richard

I suspect - and I have to stress that this is just a guess - that the BMW Nav III could play MP3's if BMW wanted it to do so. However, it is BMW that is calling the shots so far as features and functionality of this product is concerned, not Garmin.

If sufficient people asked BMW to provide music player functionality on the Nav III, well, maybe BMW might ask Garmin to do what has to be done to enable the MP3 player by way of a future software update.

Again, just a guess on my part - strictly no inside knowledge.

Michael

bmw nav 111

Thanks for the reply, i decided listening to music was whilst riding was probably not a good idea for me, so i got one today & fitted it on the bike, my only gripe is that it will not turn on without a power lead plugged in, is this normal ? i have been using tomtom on a pda for a few years & quite liked the ability to plan my routes with out having it plugged in just using the main battery, probably a really dumb question but the bmw manual does not tell you much at all

Hi Leman:

The 'pure automotive' Garmin GPSRs, such as the BMW Nav III and its fraternal twin the 2820, do not have internal batteries. This means that you have to supply them with power from somewhere (moto cable, 12 VDC car cable, or mains adapter) for them to work.

Although this might at first appear to be a disadvantage, most folks tend to use MapSource (on a PC) to plan elaborate routes, and for more impromptu route planning, just construct a route that takes you to your next planned stop, rather than trying to construct the entire day's worth of riding first thing in the morning.

Not putting batteries in the GPSR allows it to be smaller and lighter. The original version of the BMW Nav and the original version of the StreetPilot did have batteries in them, but quite a few people complained about the bulk and the weight, so, they were removed from subsequent versions.

Michael

leman said:

...probably a really dumb question but the bmw manual does not tell you much at all...

Click to expand...

Not a dumb question at all. You might want to download the Garmin manual for the StreetPilot 2820, which is identical to the BMW Nav III in almost every respect. You can download it from this link: StreetPilot 2820 Owner Manual.

Michael