What can your GPS do for you, what do you wish it could do

Mundane Pointless Stuff I Must Share (MPSIMS)
#1

I have a garmin streetpilot with maps that are about 9 years out of date, but its still a cool gizmo. Most of the time I use it in bad weather when its either fog or snow obscured, or simply looking for some place thats in city, but I have never been too before. Which in my opinion is a god send, as it stops me from being a tourist in the car, and actually lets me know a head of time when my turn is coming up.

The newer gps units have really cool features like alerting you ahead of time with regards to traffic and the coolest in my opinion is alerting you to either photo radar traffic lights or known radar locations.

Now what I would like , is for the gps to tell me exactly what lane I am in. My garmin just tells me that I am going up a stretch of road, but having lane information would be a godsend in snow covered roads, specially with those really big ditches.

Second is for GPS units to form some sort of adhoc networking , similar to what wireless does now, so that a car ahead of me would broadcast to my gps, presumeably over cell networks.

Declan

#2

Evidently there’s a need for GPS receivers, in England at least, to know how wide the roads are. From news reports I’ve seen on the web, some lorry drivers are blindly following their maps and getting stuck in narrow lanes or under bridges.

#3

I wish my GPS had proximity alarms. Lots of times I’ll need to buy something at, say, Home Depot, but it’s not pressing, I just make a mental note that the next time I am on that side of town I need to stop at Home Depot to get whatever. But then, invariably, a couple weeks later I will drive right past the Home Depot and forget what I was supposed to remember, and remember as soon as I get home. :smack:

I wish I could program my GPS with a reminder of whatever I need to get and set an alarm that will go off when I am within, say, a mile of Home Depot. Then it would pop up with a reminder, and at the push of a button, route me to the Home Depot.

I haven’t seen any GPS unit that can do this, if you know of one please let me know. I already checked the patent office and it’s been patented, so I’m surprised that Garmin or whoever hasn’t jumped on it. I think it’s a great idea.

#4

I’ve been using my Sprint phone (Razr) as my GPS unit. It is pretty damn handy. What I would like is some map updates. My own apartment isn’t on the damn map yet. According to my phone, I live in the middle of a field.

#5

I just found out that my GPS can tell me which lane I should be in. I don’t drive in large cities much, so this feature has never come into use. But, I went to visit my sister in DT Minneapolis. There were several places where the road was 5 or more lanes wide, and I needed to either be in the right, left, or center lanes to get where I was going.

In a case where I needed to be in either of the right two lanes of a 5 lane road, 5 lanes would show up on my GPS screen with white arrows in the right two. I thought it was pretty cool.

I can also play breakout and PacMan on my GPS as well as music and videos - all of which are features that I have pretty much no use for.