[ubizmo]

I made extensive use of Amazegps during a vacation in LA, from which I've just returned. I used it on my 8320 Curve, in conjunction with a Freedom Keychain GPS puck. I tried to install Nav4all a couple of times, but was unable to get it to find the GPS puck, for some reason, so I can't make any comparisons with that software...except for this one: Even without being able to get Nav4all to link up to the GPS receiver, I noted that it doesn't appear to be possible to exit Nav4all while leaving it running in the background. Using the hangup key results in being prompted as to whether you really want to exit Nav4all. AmazeGPS does allow you to leave the program running, which is, in my opinion, important.

Although this has nothing to do with Amazegps, I find that my Freedom GPS puck is pretty slow to find a satellite, most of the time. It can take several minutes. But even after it has found the satellite (icon on puck blinks), it can take Amazegps several more minutes to establish a link. I'm not sure why this is. The bluetooth connection with the Curve happens pretty quickly--usually within 20-30 seconds of turning on the GPS puck.

So, the stages are this:
1. Turn on GPS puck.
2. Activate Amazegps.
3. After 30 secs, blinking blue LED indicates that the BB and the GPS puck are paired.
4. After 2-5 minutes, blinking satellite icon on puck indicates that GPS data are being received from satellite.
5. After an additional several minutes, the connection icon on the Amazegps screen turns from red to green, indicating that Amazegps is fully functional.

So, a quick start is out of the question. I'd try to get this process going well in advance of getting in the car.

As others have commented, the "trackball lag" is annoying. When I initially set up the software, I set the default location to Pennsylvania, which is where I live. Once in LA, if I wanted to search for something I'd have to change this to California. This turned out to be quite time-consuming, due to the slow function of the scrolling. I soon changed the default to California, for the duration of the trip, in order to avoid this.

The Search function of Amazegps is disappointing. For example, if searching for a specific address, I'd be required to enter city and state; I couldn't just use the zip code. Keyword searching was also disappointing. I don't think it should have been that hard to find "disneyland" for example, but it took a bit of work. In comparison, searching using Google Maps was effortless, and I sometimes found myself exiting Amazegps to use Google Maps to find things, then plugging the data back into Amazegps for the turn-by-turn. This aspect of Amazegps definitely needs to be improved in future releases.

As for the actual turn-by-turn functionality, I'd give it a grade of B. I used it a lot, and it mostly worked well, but there were some glitches. Occasionally, it would tell me "keep right" when apparently "turn right" was what was needed, and so on. The worst situation was when I'd need to make two turns in fairly quick succession. Because of the delay in updating after the first turn was made, the instruction for the second turn might come too late, after I'd already passed the intersection. Then there would be a significant delay for the route to be recalculated. This sort of thing was mainly a problem, as you'd expect, in tight city street settings. Some or all of this lag may be an unavoidable consequence of Amazegps having to talk to its servers over the relatively slow EDGE network. I don't know how much lag is due to the software.

I also played with the real-time mapping function, and found it to be very laggy in comparison to Google Maps. It took a long time to draw the map on the screen as I changed position; Google Maps did it very quickly.

So, that's my review after using Amazegps fairly heavily for five days in LA.