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Decades ago I had a GPS navigator, and I thought it was pretty bad. But it was a paradise compared to Google Auto running on my Moto G Play in conjunction to the Sony XAV-AX5000 (which came with my used car). This combination results in a truly dangerous road experience.
I was also trying to listen to podcasts, which added yet another layer of horribleness to the experience. Let me try to summarize what happened:
First, my tablet had a vast collection of music and spoken word material, which I planned to listen to over bluetooth. This worked fine before (I hadn't bothered with navigation until now). But when I connected my phone with a USB cable, it bumped my tablet off the bluetooth port and told me the phone is now connected over bluetooth and USB. Idiots!
OK, I was still optimistic. I'll just stream some podcasts. But it got much, much worse. After a random period of time, from a few seconds to tens of minutes, I would get a 'GPS lost' message, and navigation would halt. The only way to cure it was to fiddle with the phone (while driving) to turn off and on location services, and go back to the google app on the phone. Groan.
But it got worse yet: at another random interval of a few seconds to tens of minutes, my phone would get disconnected from the Sony screen, announcing: "Unsupported USB device" - clearly bunk. I would then have to reach the USB plug, unplug it, plug it in, and again fiddle with the phone to restart navigation, occasionally from the start, giving it a destination yet again. The plugging in often resulted in another 'Unsupported' message, and I would need to do it several times. Incredibly distracting and awful.
To add insult to injury, these restarts often resulted in some podcast I was listening to a while back restarting at high volume, causing me to curse and fiddle with audio content for a while, while driving of course.
Speaking of podcasts, long ago I removed Google Podcasts from my phone, since I never intended to use it. But when I asked the google app (over the Sony, and it insists on using voice for safety) to play a podcast, it gladly played audio from Google Podcasts, showing a Google Podcasts icon on the Sony Screen. But searches were finicky, and it told me something was wrong with my Google Podcasts app for some searches. So I learned that asking for "Linux unplugged episode 520" failed, while "Linux unplugged from 11 weeks ago" worked fine.
Finally, every so often the Sony would crash and reboot (possibly from excessive USB plug/unplug cycles?), causing me to perform some form of a restart of all of my activities.
It did keep me awake, although in a particularly agitated mood, not what I was looking forward to at all.
I think I will try to find my old Garmin navigator.
P.S. Google app is extremely stupid when it comes to driving. You can't ask it simple questions like "Where am I?" or "What is the nearest city?". When asking to navigate to a nearest gas station along the route, it offers to take you hundreds of miles away. Compared to Google app, Alexa is a genius.
2023-09-30 · 5 weeks ago
I tried it on a campervan we rented and ended up disconnecting the Android Auto function. I could only have my music through Spotify (AntennaPod was out of the question for some reason?) and the GPS consumed my phone's battery while disconnecting every now and then.
It is a hot pile of garbage. We ended up using the infotaintment's GPS (a trusty Tomtom software, by the way) and the classic Bluetooth music.
Oh, and even then, it would lay a gray unresponsive windown that was annoying and prompted a couple reboots that were unnecesary. Horrible crap.
2023-10-02 · 5 weeks ago