While traveling this week I was using my phone as a back up to my friend’s wonky car GPS which kept going silent or refusing to work at all.
At one point the entire map on my phone was suddenly upside down and I was a bit worried as I was the main navigator at this point.
Massachusetts was under New York and Maine was under Massachusetts and the whole set up was so bizarre until I frantically tapped on the compass icon and everything went back to normal. I didn’t even know the little red baton in the upper right corner was a compass. I do now.
I still don’t understand what I did to make the entire northeastern map of the US go upside down.
And the wonky car GPS deposited us in front of a semi abandoned hotel deep inside the city of Worcester, Massachusetts with a similar name to the one we were headed for.
The car GPS proudly announced “You have arrived” and we believed her. After driving for 10 hours I will believe anything just to get out of the car - even a demented GPS system.
It looked a bit odd with weeds and ample parking with only a few cars in sight.
Something didn’t feel right but thankfully there was a guard at the door who gave us directions to the actual hotel about 2 blocks down.
I’ve journeyed with this amazing but occasionally fickle GPS system on my phone for many years now. I can’t imagine traveling with only paper maps and frantic stops along the way to ask for directions as we did when I was young.
GPS programs frequently have two different modes, toggled by hitting the compass icon: up is north, and up is the direction of travel or the direction the phone is pointing in (as determined by internal magnetic compass).
Sometimes the compass can go wonky and not actually point ahead. Sometimes you can fix this by moving the phone in a figure-8 pattern. Other times it might need a reboot.
If you’re more comfortable with north being up, just do what you did and hit the compass icon to toggle.
I sometimes have my phone ask me to do that to calibrate; does just doing that on your own do the same thing, or must one be in the ‘Calibrate’ function within Maps?
Calibrate in Google Maps:
Open Google Maps.
Tap the blue dot that represents your current location.
Tap Calibrate.
Follow the on-screen instructions, which may involve using your camera (Live View) to scan your surroundings for nearby landmarks or buildings.
If Live View is not available or not working, you can also calibrate using the compass.
To calibrate with the compass, you may be asked to move your phone in a figure-eight pattern, ensuring the top of the phone is pointed in the direction of movement.
The compass has to be active, but aside from that, you don’t have to be in any extra calibration mode. So you can just open Maps without going into any special menu. The calibration button is just to give them an opportunity to show you the instructions. But once you learn the pattern you can do it without hitting any extra buttons. And any app that uses the compass will work.
My phone does something similar on occasion. When I do a search like “French restaurants” or “five-star hotels”, the screen will show a map of places that match the search. Sometimes that will be turned around so I don’t know which way is up, literally. It’s oddly disorienting. I think I’ve found a way to change the settings so it’ll be north-side-up now. I’ve never had it go wonky while it’s giving directions.
For a nice bit of Massachusetts-specific GPS weirdness, try searching for “sandwich restaurants”.
Maybe worth emphasizing:
GPS can’t tell you which direction you’re pointing. It can infer a direction if you’re moving, under the assumption that you’re pointing your phone forward, but if you aren’t moving it can’t do anything.
So it uses a magnetic compass for that purpose, since that actually gives you a proper direction. But the compass can get miscalibrated (due to internal magnetic fields). And worse, it just won’t work at all in many cases. Any kind of metal surroundings can cause problems (like inside a car), not to mention electrical wires that can cause spurious fields.
Better algorithms and such can improve the situation, but it’ll never work perfectly.
Maybe I’m just old-fashioned (well, no maybes about it!) but I’m a believer in dedicated GPS systems, either built in to the car or, as in my case, mounted on the windshield. One of the useful features (I don’t know if phones have it) is that it maintains a directory of all your previous destinations, so just a single tap tells it where you want to go and the Speaking Lady springs into action and starts giving directions. I love the technology, and it’s never let me down! (Well, except the one time the Speaking Lady told me to turn onto a street that turned out to have once been a street, but was now an exclusive LRT right of way! But that wasn’t the GPS’s fault, it was the fault of an outdated map.)
And, as @Dr.Strangelove said, there are two modes for map orientation, one is that north is up, the other is that direction of travel is up. I find the latter far more natural.
this was what I was going to say and what makes car gps units of limited value in my opinion. Most integrated car GPS systems are out of date the moment you buy the car and only get worse from there. Some new systems do get over the air updates, but you may have to pay money for the privilege of having an up to date map.
We did not have to search for sandwich shops but almost every day nudged the GPS for some nearby coffee shop suggestions.
I am convinced that Massachusetts purposely hides their coffee shops for some reason.
In one town (Lexington) we drove around in circles trying to pinpoint the You Have Arrived announcement for a coffee shop we were interested in visiting.
Finally I stopped someone on the street to ask for directions. She looked at us briefly before offering to escort us to the place which was indeed nearby but hidden behind some buildings and situated on a little stream. We would not have found it otherwise.
It’s always interesting to talk to local people and inquire about the area. She was an older woman who gave us some other local travel tips while we zig zagged across the street and towards our destination.
It also turned out that she was born in a small town close to where I currently live in Pennsylvania so we had no problems chatting.
Now you have me curious about the sandwich shops lol!
We keep our GPS in silent mode. I hate the verbal directions. And regardless of where we go, I will look at a map ahead of time. I feel better if I carry the map in my head. Technology can fail, but so far, I trust my brain.
If you’re looking for restaurants specifically, IME Yelp is far more useful. Then use your navigator to go there after you’ve decided which one using Yelp.
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That sounds like a horrible fate for those poor travelers.