All roads lead to Rome

Now is the time where we really need to talk about our digital navigation-system. Before the trip we did some research on different GPS navigators and eventually bought the one that ranked best in Germany’s leading consumer product tests ‘Stiftung Warentest’ (rated ‘good’) – the ‘Falk Navigator’ F3…

Not only is ‘user-friendliness’ completely absent on this device, starting from the confusing icons that are quite opposite of ‘intuitive’, also the actual ‘navigation’ from A to B doesn’t work most of the time. Constant reminders to ‘please turn around’ where we are on the right way or asking us in its charming voice to ‘turn left’ where local laws clearly prohibit such action. Driving through Hungary the device showed us wide and open fields where we were riding down a highway, in Italy everything east of Bologna was just street-less white fog or open water where reality showed us plenty of roads and bridges and it always wanted to send us via Rome, which would have meant a detour of over 1000 kilometers.

We tried to upgrade the maps with the official Navi Manager software that’s only available for Windows operating systems, but this resulted in hours of downloading over 2 gigabytes of map data that was partly corrupted and unusable. In the end we bought a paper-map of Slovenia, and for North-East Italy we just followed our low-scale print highway map and pure intuition and managed to reach our destinations.

Now in Tuscany, the gadget seems to work okay – so far. Let’s see what roads it will present us when we’ll head towards Amsterdam next week. Probably via Rome…

Falk and Stiftung Warentest will definetly get a detailed review of this interesting piece of technology when we’ll be back in Germany.