11. Alternate Methods for Entering an Address

Figure 58: Previous Destinations

Figure 59: Navigating to a Latitude / Longitude Coordinate

The Blackbird supports navigation to a coordinates, which is handy for off-road navigation and/or geocaching.

Figure 60: Navigating to an Intersection

Figure 61: Searching the POI Database

The POI database allows you to search for restaurants, hotels, parking garages, gas stations, and much more. You can either filter the results by category (type), or if you know the name of the place you're looking for, you can type in the name directly.

Figure 62: Selecting the State

As I previously mentioned, selecting the state is very frustrating on the Blackbird; there's no way to type the state name directly. Instead, you have to scroll (one line at a time) through a list of all states. What's really odd is that there are scroll icons on the right that look like they should be for scrolling either one line at a time or one page at a time, but both buttons only scroll one line at a time. Terrible design...

Figure 63: Selecting a POI Category

Once you've entered the State, you choose a POI category. If you're not sure what category a place falls under, but you know the name, you can also just spell the name of the place directly.

64: Searching the POI Database

In this example, I'm searching for a restaurant. Once you've selected Restaurant as the POI category, you can further filter the list by cuisine type, or just press "All Types" to view all restaurants.

Figure 65: Sorting the POI Search Results

After you've told the Blackbird you're looking for restaurants, you can choose how you want to order the results. If you want to view the restaurants in order of closeness to your current position, you would choose "Sort by Distance". You can also have the results listed alphabetically, or tell the unit to list restaurants within a specific city (this is useful, for example, if you want to find a restaurant near your destination address rather than your current position).

Figure 66: Searching the POI Database

Once you've found the POI (point of interest) you're looking for, you can tap on the name and have the Blackbird start routing you to it.

12. The Trouble With the Blackbird's Address Entry System

When using the Alpine Blackbird, you quickly notice that the address entry system is seriously flawed. I consistently had a difficult time entering addresses successfully into the Blackbird. To illustrate the difficulty, let's try to enter the address 135 Central Park West in New York City. This is a major apartment building located in Manhattan on Central Park West -- this should be a very easy address to handle.

Figure 67: Main Menu

The first step in entering the address is tapping on "Destination" from the main menu.

Figure 68: Navigating to an Address

Since we know the exact street address (135 Central Park West) that we want to navigate to, we'll choose "Address"

Figure 69: Selecting the State

I've already mentioned how annoying selecting the state is -- you have to scroll through the list of every state, one at a time. Why on earth Alpine didn't offer a mechanism to type in the state name, or at least scroll a page at a time is a mystery.

Figure 70: Selecting the State

Once we've scrolled down far enough, I select "New York" as the state

Figure 71: Finding the Address

Now that we've chosen New York as the state, it's time to enter the Street Name.

Figure 72: Entering the Street Name

Our destination address is on Central Park West, so I start typing out C-E-N-T-R-A

Figure 73: Where is Central Park West?

Hmm... After entering C-E-N-T-R-A, the results list appears and the only available street to choose is "Centralia-Hartfield". That's odd, where is Central Park West? Central Park South? And over a dozen other street names that are valid in New York and begin with Central? Ok, let's back out and try our luck if we enter the city name before the street name.

Figure 74: Entering Manhattan as the City Name

Thankfully, the city name can be entered via the keyboard, and you don't have to scroll through a list of all cities (like you do with the State selection screen)

Figure 75: Choosing Manhattan as the City Name

Typing in M-A-N-H on the city selection screen brings up this list of results. So far so good, let's choose Manhattan.

Figure 76: Entering the Street Name

In this example, we want to go to Central Park West, so I start typing in C-E-N-T-R and get the results list shown below in figure 77

Posted by Fletch on November 25, 2006 | Comments (23)