Navigating with the COMAND Navi System

Pressing the NAV button on the console brings up the main navigation screen, shown above. From here, you can route to a saved destination from your address book (Destination Memory), enter a new destination address (Destination Entry), route to a previous destination (Last Destinations), or search the POI (Points of Interest) database.

One of the first things I noticed when operating the Mercedes navigation console is that the terminology is confusing. Why is the address book referred to as "Destination Memory". And "Last Destinations" is much more confusing than "Previous Destinations".

In this example, I'm going to be entering the destination address of 135 Central Park West in New York City, so I'll choose "Destination Entry" using the arrow keys on the pushbutton switch and press OK to continue.

The first step in entering a destination address is to input the city name. Using the arrow buttons on the pushbutton switch, you scroll around the virtual keyboard on the screen, spelling out the city name one letter at a time.

Notice how the Mercedes only allows you to select letters that would spell a valid city name - a nice time-saving feature that both speeds data entry and reduces the likelihood of misspellings.

Once enough letters have been entered that only a few possible matching names could be found, pressing the List soft key on the right displays all possible matching city names.

I'll be navigating to an address in New York City, so I'll choose New York City, NY using the pushbutton switch.

One of the drawbacks to the Maybach's navigation system is that it is DVD-based, rather than flash memory or hard-drive based, so accessing data can be slow at times.

Entering the street name is the second step in routing to a street address, and works exactly the same way the city entry process does.

Just like the city selection process, once enough of the street name has been entered that the GPS can reduce the list of matching street names, the Mercedes presents a list of possible street names that match the letters you entered. In this case I'm trying to input 135 Central Park West as the street address, so I'll scroll down to "CENTRAL PARK W" and press OK on the pushbutton to continue.

Oddly enough, the COMAND Navi system allows me to start routing to the destination without entering a house number. It does give the option of specifying a house number or cross street (Intrsct.), so I'll press the "Hse. no." softkey and input a house number.

Using the arrow keys on the pushbutton, I entered 135 as the house number and then pressed OK.

After entering 135 as the house number and pressing OK, the Mercedes presented me with the strange menu shown above. Apparently, I could not choose 135 as the house number for my destination address (even though 135 is a valid street number and all other GPS units allow me to enter this address without issue, as does any online mapping portal).

Instead, Mercedes' navigation system created groupings of valid house number ranges along my chosen street (Central Park West). A quick check on Google Maps reveals that these groupings each represent one block. For example, the 130-139 represents all the addresses from 73rd - 74th street, so the GPS will end up routing us very close to our desired destination address of 135 Central Park West, but for some odd reason the system won't allow us to enter the exact house number as our destination address.

Now that we've entered the city name, street name, and house number (sort of), the navigation system has all the information it needs to start routing us to our destination address, and displays the screen shown above. From here we can use the soft keys along the left and right hand sides of the 7-inch display to:

• View the destination address on the map ("Map")
• Find parking at our destination address ("Parking")
• Search the POI database for businesses along the route or near our destination address ("POIs")
• Save the address to the address book for future use ("Save")
• Go back and adjust the destination address ("Back")

Or we can scroll over to "Start Route Guidance" and have the 'Benz start routing us.

Tapping on the Map softkey in the previous screen displays the destination address (135 Central Park West in this example) on the map - a helpful feature for getting an idea of what the destination address will look like.