Windows Phone Thoughts: OnCourse? Of Course! OnCourse Navigator 6 Reviewed

Voice Instructions
OCN6 makes some points with the most thorough voice instructions of any navigation software that I’ve tested. The best example of this is the fact that it gives you the travel distance to the next instruction, even if it’s a fairly short distance, like a mile or more. I appreciate this information, because it helps you to know when to prepare to follow another instruction. If it’s a short distance, I know to remain alert for further instructions, whereas if it’s a longer distance, I know that I can relax a bit and just follow the road. The previous version of OCN did this only for longer distances (I think 25 miles or more), while TTN6 doesn’t do this at all.

OCN6 also gives you a verbal heads-up that it’s recalculating a route. I think it’s important to be cognizant of the fact that your route has changed, so you know that instructions that you may have seen in an earlier route review may no longer be part of your route. By contrast, TTN6 does its route recalculations silently. But both products do them very quickly.

OCN6 can give you both a warning tone and the voice instruction when a maneuver is required. The tone gets your attention so that the instruction doesn’t just blend in with radio sounds or conversation. This is a worthwhile addition in my opinion.

Both OCN6 and TTN6 give you an early warning that a maneuver is coming up. However, I prefer the TomTom implementation. With TTN6, the distance before the maneuver at which the warning sounds varies by speed. When you’re travelling at highway speeds, the early warning comes at 2 miles before the instruction, with another early warning at about ½ mile. At lower speeds, the early warning distance is reduced to 1 mile or ½ mile. On the other hand, the early warning distance in OCN6 is preset at ½ mile and it doesn’t vary by speed. If you’re on a busy interstate highway or expressway, ½ mile may not be enough advance notice to smoothly and easily change lanes in anticipation of your next turn or exit. (Update: A member has reported that his setup of OCN6 gives advance warning at 3 miles at highway speeds and is speed sensitive just like TTN6. So my experience is probably due to a different setting.)

The volume controls in OCN6 are superior to those in TTN6. The volume control in OCN6 is completely independent from system volume. When you run OCN6, it will set the Pocket PC to whatever volume you’re set within the program, even if that volume is higher than the current system volume setting. When you exit OCN6, it will return the volume to the system setting.

TTN6 works similarly, with one exception. It will change the volume to the program settings when run and set the volume back to system settings when you exit. However, at run time, it uses the current system volume as the maximum volume. If you need maximum volume with TTN6, you have to set the system volume to maximum prior to running it, a step that isn’t required with OCN6. Since the system volume that you’d use at home or in an office is usually lower than the volume you’d need to hear instructions while driving, the OCN6 design makes more sense here.

Another useful volume related feature is dynamic volume control. OCN6 can automatically increase the volume as speed (and cabin noise) increase. This is another detail that’s well thought out.

Contacts Issue
Another feature that OCN6 shares with other nav programs is the ability to select a contact to use the address as a destination. However, I found the implementation here to be troublesome. Initially, every time I attempted to import contacts, only 1 contact living 1100 miles away was imported. All other contacts were ignored, including local ones with addresses that the program could use from the Find menu. I sent an inquiry to tech support and they told me that the import function only works with addresses that OCN6 could parse. In order to ensure this, I found that it was necessary to make the following changes to the addresses of my contacts:

Eliminate full street types, i.e. replace Drive with Dr;

And Dr. won't work... no period allowed;

Symbols like # for apartment or unit numbers are invalid;

Street directions must be, for example, S instead of South, again with no period;

Numeric street names must be like 10 St... 10th St is invalid.

I finally got frustrated with having to butcher all of the addresses in my contacts list, so I decided to pass on OCN6's contact functionality. The bottom line is, if you frequently use your Contacts list to set destinations, you may want to check to see that this works to your satisfaction before purchasing OCN6.

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