First questions about the Race 2
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@duffman19 said in First questions about the Race 2:
You guys make great points. I don’t think anyone is really using a watch to make high-level navigation decisions (at least I hope not). Suunto’s barebones maps are really great for giving just a bit of context when you are following a pre-planned route.
But having just a few simple POIs baked-in would be really great for the examples you gave above. Things like shelters, water, trailheads, parking lots, cliffs, peaks, and the like (“mountain” focused POIs) would be awesome for quick diversions or emergency situations. And making them an optional layer (good point @szleslie!) would be great so you can still enjoy a simple, uncluttered map experience when you don’t need them.
Having a POI icon layer (no labels, just icons) would be a great way for Suunto to differentiate themselves from the competition while keeping things clean and simple.
This is a fantastic idea, but perhaps something mixed or more avanced is better.
In Garmin the saturation is specially on big cities, and when you are walking in a big city you are very likely using your mobile phone (and running I’m not sure at all if they do have sense in big cities). So perhaps POIs do not have much sense in that scenario and to see an oversaturated (and slow) map. Perhaps some street names can be useful though.
Garmin has a lot of room to improve here because walking with the watch in that scenario can be really frustrating.But it does have a lot of sense to have POI icons by default in the mountains because you are going to see very few and it makes the navigation look much better done. That’s the case of the waterdrop when refering to water fountains.
Or even on small villages by default for the waterdrop but also things like bus/train stations (i.e, on a trail running race when you arrive to multiple small towns).
No need to say but POI icons are the same on all brands, all are standard so everybody understands the navigation regardless of the device. A waterdrop is a water fountain in Garmin but also in Amazfit.
But anyway, I think POIs should be there (everybody seems to have them), but it is more important to have a perfect navigation in all the explained scenarios.
And the navigation is probably the most important thing to be finally fixed now, and thinking in this Race 2 but also the future Vertical 2 (if it wants to be a Fenix competitor when navigating).
This is the generation that the navigation should arrive to a perfect point now the watches are so good (and remembering what Amazfit has accomplished with the so nice navigation for the T-Rex 3, not even for the turn-by-turns in all the scenarios, but for TBT in GPX imported tracks and even POIs) .
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@Tomas5 There are offline maps on your phone that work without internet. Why display such things on a tiny watch screen?
The POI icons themselves make more sense.
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@dreamer_ said in First questions about the Race 2:
In Garmin the saturation is specially on big cities, and when you are walking in a big city you are very likely using your mobile phone (and running I’m not sure at all if they do have sense in big cities). So perhaps POIs do not have much sense in that scenario and to see an oversaturated (and slow) map. Perhaps some street names can be useful though.
Garmin has a lot of room to improve here because walking with the watch in that scenario can be really frustrating.Not many people go deep into configuration options on Garmin, but Garmin maps do have level of details as a configuration option - Low, Medium, High. Depending on this option, the map turns on or off certain map elements - POIs, trails, etc.
I wonder if the same could be done by Suunto. I understand that Garmin uses vector maps and Suunto uses bitmap (raster) maps. But perhaps map elements could be made transparent through color mapping or opacity channel - modern graphics accelerators should do that efficiently. I suppose Suunto already does something like that because different map elements (trails, forest roads, residential roads) disappear at different map zoom levels.
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@sky-runner a little correction of my posts. It seems I only see now the waterdrops on my Epix Pro even on towns by default. Something has changed, I remember a very saturated map. But that was a while ago. I suppose I can look further at settings (by default is just fine now for me)
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@maszop well maybe in yours yes but i don’t. I used to have mapy.cz but they switched from free to paid plan and now in free you can have only single country offline. So especially when i am abroad not every time i swich offline map just for one day trip because i need to download few hundred MB of data and as soon as i am back from hike i need download again my home country. Which is not much userfriendly. And google maps offline are not so good in mountains. But in suunto watch you can have multiple countries at same time. And i don’t sugest many labels poi in suunto map. Just some basic important orientation points. Maybe peek names, rivers, water fountains, waterfals. Thinks that will help you orient fast if you get lost or if you are not exactly sure which way to continue. Even when you have planned route saved pn watch it can help you orient better when you have at leas peak names around you. Possibli switchable on/off in settings.
But this is discusion for another topic perhaps. And even i am not initiator of this suggestion i just joint opinion of other that it can be usefull.
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@sky-runner I had the same thing happen to me this weekend. Approaching an out and back route it decided to do it in reverse which made climb guidance very unusable
