First Sea Trial

[Ben]

I took my Droid1 and car windshield mount and went for a boat ride
this evening and was VERY impressed with the performance of your app.

The Good:
-Pre-cache of my intended travel area meant that I did not have any
lag when moving across tiles. Icon stayed centered in the map well,
and my loss of cell signal at times did not keep me from knowing where
I was.
-Position alignment was great. At ±6 feet I could clearly tell which
side of the channel I was in, and how close I was to the buoys.
-Display readability was terrific. At 14-15 zoom I could read the
depths easily, and see the marker numbers while driving.

Nice to Have:
-I'll toss in my hat with the "Anchor Alarm" folks. That is a feature
that would come in handy almost every time I take out the boat.
-Include some minor heads up display information. You have the Lat/
Long displayed on the bottom, but honestly current Speed and Bearing
would be more useful information to most people. I found myself
switching over to ZipDashboard to check speed underway.
-Transferring routes from the web to the phone would be awesome. I
know we can export a .gpx (whatever that is), but I don't know how
we'd be able to use it on the mobile app.
-North Up versus Heading Up option would be quite nice for the Port-
Starboard impaired among us.

Confusion:
-I was a little bit confused on how to know if I was using a cached
map versus streaming live maps. I loaded the pre-cached ones, and
assumed I was using them, but some indicator or something might be
nice.
-We will certainly need a tutorial video or something to go along with
the app when it hits the market. Something to explain how to mark
points, download maps, even zoom in/out, is almost a must for
something with as many features as this.
-I tended to crash when trying to download more than ~40mb of maps at
a time. You might want to pop up a warning if trying to download more
than that at once.


Overall amazing app, and when it is released I will certainly be
rushing to purchase a full version. Even at the $50 price for the DVD
software it would beat the hell out of buying a $1500 chartplotter.
And the chartplotters will have fewer points of interest, and a more
limited set of charts!

[GrneoP]

Hey Ben,

I'm with you,
I been using this app side by side with my GPS chart plot, and
honestly it is great.

So far I didn't have any problems downloading maps. don't know if has
anything to do with the phone. I'm using the HTC Incredible.

Gustavo