Cool Alpine feature?

[Al]

When out on our UK tour last weekend my son has found another feature that I didn't know about in the Alpine. Certain aspects are good and some I am off mixed opinion about.

With the Nav Screen up on display there are 3 bits of info bottom left all shown by icons. Bottom one is satellite signal or similar. Next up is the compass facility or whatever it is supposed to be, that changes you between the different types of display and the one above that for data (and I can't remember what it looks like as offshore now) but it has the measured present speed displayed and expected journey time left if in directions mode. Press it (in his case by accident as I chucked car down the road ) and a whole new page of data information comes up. Some of it is interesting and some boring but one of the things you can bring up in further sub menus is a large digital speedo which is the sat nav calculated speed. These are usually very accurate which if nothing else confirms that the speedo is also very accurate. That is some of the cool. Although no where near line of sight it gives you a digital MPH readout and not bloody KmPH as displayed in option 1 on dash.

However there is also a max speed obtained display there as well. This cannot be cancelled as far as I can tell without a reboot of the unit by dash removal. I know that because it was surprisingly low at 100 or so despite knowing I had been higher (on a race track honest officer). The reboot only being a few days before we found this. After that we set it much higher (on another deserted race track near midnight) and it is still remaining there now despite many engine offs.

So is it cool? Or a tool to be used against you potentially? I personally do not like it one bit without a reset facility. For all we know it may record the location, date & time this speed was actually achieved in the software. Big brother is watching your every move in this damn country and now we even have spies in the car.

I would start a "What MPH does yours say today" topic but that wouldn't be very wise I suppose.

[Beady]

Al,

a very good find, I will check it out.

My bike has a max speed record on the dash but this is easily removed at the flick of reset button.

I would like to think there is a very easy way to reset this in the car....

Far too much big brother for my liking

[S7 EXG]

if you want a digital speed readout, you can configure the 3 small bits to the LHS of the nav map screen with one of them as speed. Quite helpful. I have used the info screen you refer to before, but not tried to reset the speed. Anyway this would read 150mph odd from a trackday, so in itself, not incriminating.

[bolly girl]

Al - didn't realise you couldn't reset it, had already found this little screen of info when stuck on A1 having a fiddle as a passenger. Will have a look at ours later - just returned from the garage because it wouldn't give vision with moving map and to resolve another hard reset was completed - fingers crossed otherwise it's another replacement unit required.

[mfretwell@mgeo.ca]

Is there anyway to display the track the unit has followed since new?

In other words all of the route's the car has driven?

It would be great to be able to download the GPS and post tracklogs on Google Earth.

[Bibs]

As a unit the Alpine deserves a -3 out of 10 so I doubt if it could do anything as remotely useful as that, plus it would need quiet a bit of storage onboard for all the tracks which it doesn't have. There's an app for that though, perhaps you need an iPhone in your life?

[Kim.com]

A suggestion could be like this:

Tuesday i was driving a small trip and ended up in a cafe in Copenhagen. In my telephone (Android based) i installed a Google application called Mytracks.

When starting you simply pres a button and during the trip you can read average time and speed plus a lot of other things, like elevation etc.

At the end you stop it and then it is possible to save and upload and send in various formats like .kml file for GE

If you have Google Earth installed click here Clickey.....

If you click on (end) marker, it will display the result.

Read more here. . . . .

/Kim

Edited May 28, 2010 by Kim.Poulsen