1490 Wasted Screen Real Estate; Audio Disability

The nice large and colorful screen on the 1490 leaves a few things to be desired. IMHO some of them are:

What the heck street am I on? The big banner at the top nicely lets me know what street my next turn will be on to, but if I want to know what street I am actually driving on now, I have to press the car icon to bring up the Where Am I screen. Why can't the firmware show the current street at the bottom center in a banner? There's certainly enough screen real estate and resolution for both, and I would assume there's enough CPU horsepower to generate and display both.

What compass direction am I heading? Yes, I know it can be displayed on the right in one of the four right-edge fields, but I find other data to be more important. Why for goodness sakes can't Garmin put a compass heading or north arrow on the map itself?

I know it's been said before, but it bears repeating: the information bubble for a map point cannot be easily dismissed. Just touching the screen lightly outside the bubble should tell the unit to cease displaying it. Worse yet, the screen is too touch sensitive, so when trying to drag around the screen with a finger drag, it way too often just pops up another info bubble!

Don't get me wrong, I like the unit. It just seems that so much could be done to improve it at litte or no cost.

Other wish-list thought, but this time regarding audio:

I often would like to hear audibles for POI's but not directions. AFAICT, it's all or nothing with the audio. Mute mutes everything, and there's no setting for turning off audio navigation prompts, or even minimizing/maximizing the unit's audible directions.

In the 1990's GM cars automatically raised the speaker volume as your speed increased. IIRC it was customizable to some extent. The GPSr knows what the speed is. How hard would it be to program the firmware to raise the volume as the speed increases? If GM (even Chevrolet!) was doing it 20 years ago, how hard could it be?

/rant off