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Satnav challenge 2: the middle of nowhere

Posted on 20 Jul 2010 at 17:24

Route: Parrott Inn, Ockley Road, Dorking, Surrey RH5 5RZ to Merstham (sic) Wood Golf Club, Coombe Lane, Guildford, GU3 3PB

Challenge two was literally a mission impossible – and not because we’d exceeded the drink drive limit at the Parrott Inn in challenge 1. In what can only be described as a schoolboy error, Barry had put down the wrong golf course name on the sheets handed to the drivers. Instead of Merrist Wood Golf Club, Barry had directed the troops – including himself – to the entirely mythical Merstham Wood Golf Club.

What had started as a straightforward driving exercise had – quite by accident – suddenly turned into a test of machine and human ingenuity, to see if the satnavs and their drivers could cope with incorrect instructions. A real-world challenge if ever there was.

Human error followed human error, as map reader Tim entirely failed to spot the golf club typo, located the patch of green next to Coombe Lane in Surrey and pointed his nippy little Vauxhall Astra in the direction of Guildford.

If a lack of mobile reception was a mild inconvenience for Barry, it was an altogether more serious problem for our two satnav freeloaders

Sarah once again decided to use the TomTom’s Google search to hunt down the golf club, but even a corporation that spends billions of pounds a year on refining its search algorithms can’t reasonably be expected to anticipate the mental failings of a harassed PC Pro features editor, and so naturally failed to find something that doesn’t exist. Instead, Sarah punched in the postcode and set off.

Barry too entered the postcode into his iPhone CoPilot, but Coombe Lane didn’t appear on the list of streets covered by that postcode, so he decided to merely enter the town and street name into his iPhone. Having once again failed to get a decent signal to download the traffic updates for his pre-planned route, he decided to carry on regardless. But if a lack of mobile reception was a mild inconvenience for Barry, it was an altogether more serious problem for our two satnav freeloaders...

Nowhere to go

Both Google Maps and Nokia’s Ovi Maps download their maps on demand, rather than storing them on the device. Nokia does provide the option of downloading free UK maps, but seeing that this can’t be performed directly from the phone’s Ovi store but instead requires you to install the sync suite and then upload maps to the phone, we concluded most users would either ignore or simply not know of this facility, and so decided to test Ovi Maps in its native form.

Unfortunately, neither Jon nor Priti could get a sufficient data signal from the car park at the rural Parrott Inn. Confronted with a blank screen, Priti leapt out of her car and banged on the window of challenge organiser Barry. “What am I supposed to do if I can’t get a signal?” she demanded. “Drive until you get one,” he replied, while comprehensively failing to mask the smugness of a man whose smartphone actually had maps installed. Priti’s response would be considered a bit coarse for a Guy Ritchie film, and she returned to her car distinctly unamused.

Jon, on the other hand, isn’t the type of man to be phased by a lack of 3G signal: think Ray Mears, only thinner and hideously more ginger. Jon’s bush instincts kicked in, and having decided that his best hope of tracking down mobile reception would be to head towards a built-up area, he pointed the bungalow-on-wheels back in the direction of the main road he’d travelled down in the last challenge. Within five minutes he’d picked up a signal and tapped in the postcode for the golf course, which Google Maps rejected without reason, forcing Jon to enter the town and street name instead.