Recalculating Revisited

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As you know your unit does not "announce" recalculating but does recalculate. When you made the wrong turn, it did a recalculation and did change the metrics of the trip. Had you thought to look at it, you would have seen the change but I know I would not have checked my 2595 in such a situation.

I know of no way to get either a visual or audio warning in such a situation.

My 3790 has multiple selections if the speed, or time tabs are tapped on the route screen. Time to destination is one of them.

You may have it as well.

I presume the 3790 has the ability to set up a dashboard. I have a 4 section dashboard, that displays "ETA to Destination", "Time to Next Via Point", "Speed" and "Direction".

If you set this up you could see change to next via or destination at a glance, without touching the screen.

It would be nice to have a beep or something like that if the unit was recalculating. I know the recalculating was annoying but after we missed our turn and she recalculated to smaller roads and we were too far to turn back when we noticed. This added about 30 minutes to our route....

Needless to say I was the one who was supposed to be watching that

Be careful what you ask for - you just might get it!

Many customers hated the recalculating "alert" but there was a flip side.

Garmin listened and did away with the alert and now we want another change.

I'll admit that it would be nice to not hear the recalculating "alert" because there is a specific route that I take using my 765 where I get several "recalculating" in a row - due to the fact that an intersection has been redone (moving it about 500 feet from where it once was putting it further along a curving stretch of road). I will continue to get them until the new maps catch up with the road change (which I think will be a year or so).

It sounds easy to say that a feature should be built in that would let the user determine some set of thresholds over which a message would announce that the route had changed by x miles or y minutes. However, my feeling is that this would be a major effort and very few people would ever know such a feature existed. Just think of all the times one of us has chimed in after someone answered a question and said "I didn't know you could do that".

That's exactly what I do. I leave one of them permanently set for "Time to Next Via Point" in case I use Trip Planner. It still displays the arrival time normally when not on a route.

Time to destination or via point display does work - but you need to constantly keep an eye on it, just in case you go wrong - and you don't always know when you went wrong unless to keep checking constantly.

With traffic - you I get a pop-up to show where and where the congestion is. Something similar could be provided for route changes due to re-calculate.

I never minded the "recalculating", in fact it let you know that your route had changed without having to look at, or touch the screen. In the end, this should be one of those user-configurable (recalculating alert on/off) settings like the older "bong" alert, alerting the user that a turn is coming up, or the user-configurable keypress "beep" (on/off). These are the kinds of settings that Garmin used to, but now doesn't provide for the user.

This is a classic example of something that should be configurable by the user. My wife hates any and all audible output from my GPS, so ALL sound is turned off when she is with me. When I am alone in the car, I have sound turned on for selected POI info and for exceeding the speed limit.

It only takes a moment to change the options, and the payback in domestic tranquility is definitely worth that time.

- Tom -

I just to love the "recalculating" and at first missed it, over time I like the new method of just redirecting me as I drive. I have to admit though, I never really paid much attention to checking the "time to destination" much.

Many people turn off U-Turns in their settings. I tried that and then failed to make a left turn onto the highway. I went on across the highway and the GPS then wanted me to continue 12 miles until there was an opportunity to make a series of turns that would send me right back to the highway. No thanks. I removed that setting and don't have that sort of problem anymore.

This is exactly what happened to the Traffic Icon that was supposed to turn Grey when there was no traffic signal. Too many of the Technology Challenged Users complained because they never read the manual and couldn't figure out why it went from Green to Grey.

Garmin simply did a knee jerk response and made it so it never turns Grey, unless you disconnect the power cord. How useless was that.

Typical Garmin Engineering response.

If I understand your post - the unit will try to take you back to the original route, rather than taking you on a long detour if you enable U-Turns.

This would have avoided the 30 minute extra travel on the prior trip.

Thanks for the hint.

If I understand your post - the unit will try to take you back to the original route, rather than taking you on a long detour if you enable U-Turns.

This would have avoided the 30 minute extra travel on the prior trip.

Thanks for the hint.

Only if the GPS sees a viable place to turn around, like an intersection or street. Many other places may come before that, though. Pull-outs, driveways, etc.

It's nutty how Garmin is so quick to remove useful features that can likely easily be made "user-configurable" because of user complaints like recalculating, keypress "beep", alert "bong" preceding a turn, ability to disable auto-zoom, etc, etc...nowadays, seems as if once removed, the features never come back.

I didn't mind the recalculating warning so much...only that it repeated (nagged) over and over while it was figuring things out. I think it would have been fine if it just said it once.

Garmin also took out the "Traffic Ahead" voice warning at some point. I really miss this and never understood why they did it. Now there's just a faint beep that easy to miss. They have really messed with the traffic feature over the years and made it worse in the long run IMO.

One feature I'd really like to see is some indication from the Nuvi that the current path was selected due to traffic delays on what would ordinarily have been the fastest path.

For example, without traffic, the fastest route is Route A, which may be your typical commuting route. However, the device calculates a quicker route, Route B, due to traffic on Route A.

It would really be great if the Nuvi would give some sort of visual and audible indicator that it has selected Route B based on traffic conditions that make Route A longer than Route B.

The reason why this would be very helpful is that often Route A is an interstate, but Route B is a series of side roads paralleling the interstate. It selects the side roads because it can only detect traffic on the interstate and there are no traffic feeds regarding traffic conditions on the side road, so it presumes the side roads have no traffic, when in reality the driver knows that any delays on the interstate cause the side roads to backup with spillover traffic, so in reality staying on the interstate (Route A) is in fact faster than detouring onto the side roads.

I drove my GF's car the other day. I had given her my 3790 a month back or so but haven't used that device for a couple of years until the other day. While on a route, I heard the old familiar "Traffic Ahead"...I believe it must have been removed on units after the 3790 since my 3490 has only the "bong" sound.

Yes indeed...typical Garmin.

On my 255WT the unit will at times say "traffic ahead".

Since I use Turbo's VoiceEditor to change recalculating, lost satellite reception etc using the voice name Karen, I looked to change traffic ahead but couldn't find it within the file.

Therefore my POI Factory Gurus, where is traffic ahead coming from & how can I change it

Sorry canuk...I really couldn't tell you since I don't modify my voice file. Maybe it's simply not a modifiable phrase. Is "Ready to navigate" in the voice file? If not, maybe it's not modifiable either.

Is in the voice file but not traffic ahead. Perhaps the unit has a certain number of phrases as you say that can't be modified

u can edit out the "recalculating" on most voice files with TTSVoiceEditor. Actually u can change it to anything u want - I tried that and most everything is just as annoying. U might try "beep".