BMW Navigation Install

Gayjin said:
I don't personally think your choice is the route I would have gone. I think the functionality it provides is good, and no doubt it is far more flexible and expandable than a solution from a major ICE manufacturer.

The Sony, seems to be a much more well rounded solution in the way that appears to be a polished proprietary solution and has a Tom Tom, which would be a massive USP for me.
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The Tomtom was previously a massive draw but thats before I seriously considered a unit like this. Remember - you can put Tomtom on this if you wish, and from using it I'd rate iGo at least as good as TomTom. Which goes a long way to defeating the main advantage of the Sony.

However, the dealbreaker for me is the pricepoint. I don't think I could drop that much on a chinese unit. It's a ridiculous amount of money for it.
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Yea, the price is annoying. Effectively I've rationalised it by saying I've bought a £300 unit and paid £300 for the OEM look, fit and integration level. Which still doesn't rationalise it, but there we go. You cannot escape the fact that due to a complete lack of alternatives on the market, it is overpriced.

But this was never a money saving solution - none of the 3 options I originally considered were cheap anyway. I wanted an integrated navigation system and was happy with quite how much it would cost to get that.

I can, however, sell my Intravee setup for at least £200 taking the net upgrade cost down.
 
pepsilol said:
How would people react to one of these sytems but with more of an iDrive layout..?
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In theory, wow, that would be amazing. In practice I'm not entirely sure how much difference it would make. I've included a photo of the menu you get currently and it's far from ugly but in reality you almost never see it unless you want to change a function or look at the OBC or something. Therefore you could put a load of effort into an iDrive style menu and still end up with a unit which 99% of the time is displaying a navigation map anyway.

Plus the iDrive interface is the way it is because it uses a hard wired controller not a touchscreen, so it arguably isn't the ideal layout for a touchscreen anyway?

If I had to pick improvements I'd want a capacitive touchscreen and a faster CPU with more memory long before I'd want an iDrive style interface.
 
Just popped a new Class 10 SD card in. Wow, Navigation is much more responsive and far quicker at calculating routes etc :)
 
paradigm said:
Surprised there isn't any proper internal storage?
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You are not suprised at all, be honest :p

markyp23 said:
Fox, what brand is the unit? Do they make OEM looks for other manufacturers?

Do the physical OEM-look buttons work or are they all for show?
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It's made by a company called Dynavin. They also do exactly the same unit for E46, E90, E87 and also various Audi's, VW's and Mercedes models.

The OEM look buttons do all work, yes.
 
Lucero said:
Random question, when in reverse your front PDCs are active too right, does whatever is infront of you appear on the display (assuming you are parked close to a wall or another car)?
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Yes it does - it displays visual info from all 8 PDC sensors on the car. The issue is that once you pop it out of reverse it returns you to Nav/Radio/whatever thinking you are done reversing.

This sounds like more of an issue than it really is - factory PDC is of course still functioning.
 
MatteH Oxford said:
The pdc has to be both activated & switched off somehow. If you don't want to use a separate & manually activated switch, I can't see any other way.
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Well the easiest thing to do is just.. only use the screen based stuff for reversing? It really isn't an issue - when using front PDC I have the same PDC I've always had, no change. When using rear PDC I have the additional functionality of on-screen display.
 
Gooner14 said:
What's the glare like in the sun? I'm seriously considering one (e46), I'm just concerned the interface will be to 'klunky' and not OEM enough.
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In direct sunlight there is glare on the screen but it reduces your view rather than removes it. You can still see the screen. I might look into an antiglare coating or something.

As for the interface, for the simple swapping between Radio, Nav and iPod mode, the interface is absolutely fine. You only really need to use the interface when delving deeper which you dont need to often. But even when you do the menu system is visually attractive, you can see a picture of it in my first post. Where the interface lets itself down is in the settings menu where it looks less professional. But once it's set up how often do you go in there?

I always run in Nav mode so I see the interface as much as I did when I had iDrive, ie not much.

And remember, its a replacement/alternative for the E46/E39 OEM system. The interface on that wasn't going to win any design awards for asthetics and ease of use, it was a series of text based menus controlled entirely by fiddling with the knobs on the side!

It doesnt look as slick or nice as the latest generation of iDrive thats for sure. But then good luck getting that into an E39/E46 :p

Best thing to do is to have a go with one before you decide - or order one and send it back if its crap (You can get it powered up and working in a few minutes before you do the install, its a simple case of plugging the quadrablock int be back).

I guess part of the reason I am so happy with it is my expectations were about as low as you can get. I bought it expecting to send it back.
 
MatteH Oxford said:
I think that would be on idrive vehicles only, it would use the vehicle speed sensor to know when you've driven away so yeah, what you're saying is correct for more modern setups. I dunno if fox's car even has an input from the VSS via the canbus or something?. Or even if his new unit supports such a thing.

I'm presuming (perhaps wrongly!) from his description of how the current system works i.e. when reverse is engaged.
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He is totally correct in his explanation of how the factory PDC works. Reverse engages it, driving over 15mph turns it off.

As putting the car into reverse will tell the bus the car is in reverse its this information the Nv unit uses to change mode and this is why it changes back when you change out of reverse.
 
Lucero said:
So, OOI, how does the E60 PDC work whereby the screen stays on until you drive forwards over 15mph and both front and rear PDCs are active?
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Because it's designed that way from the ground up. The E60 visual PDC function is an integrated extension of the stock PDC functionality.

E39: Engage reverse. Car flags up that it is in reverse. PDC engages due to receipt of this information. This turns on the light on the PDC button and turns the sensors on. Light and sensors remain on until either:

a) The car exceeeds a certain speed
b) The PDC button is pressed

The E60 works in exactly the same way only with the addition of the visual PDC.

Because my unit is aftermarket, uses the same reverse signal from the IBUS to put itself into PDC mode but it uses the same reverse on/off state in order to exit PDC mode. The reason why it does this is because the unit was originally designed for the E46 3 Series which is not fitted with front PDC and therefore works perfectly using this method. They presumably couldn't be arsed/decided it wasn't worth the faff/didn't even think about redesigning this aspect just to suit E39 owners, who I'd imagine are quite a small proportion of total sales.
 
f00f1ght0r said:
Wait a second you mean that you didn't buy the correct specification after your 20 years of searching for the 'perfect car' ?!
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I bought it when I was a Uni student, I was happy enough to be buying a 4 year old 5 Series in such circumstances and understandably chose to focus on condition over outright specification. This was back when most E39 Sport's were big money and a car with navigation was quite literally £2000 more expensive and, given it was a £4k option when the car was new, rare. Rarer still to find a manual Sport *with* navigation.

The car I chose had almost everything I wanted (the standard spec of the E39 is generous for the time) and was in fantastic condition, with a single private owner from new and still had BMW warranty. I wasn't going to turn it down because it had no Satnav. That would have been foolish in the extreme.
 
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I did look into these, yes. There are a bunch of guys in the States who have been importing them. They seem much less polished than the unit I went for though functionality wise they are very similar. I wasn't looking for the cheapest solution and it was very important that it looked right so I decided against them.

Mine was only £100 more than that, though.

As for mine - getting on really well. Love it. The novelty of playing around with it has worn off now so it simply gets used.. well, as a normal navigation/audio device for which its absolutely great. Mapping is great, used it for a couple of reasonably long trips now and I'm wondering how I ever put up with a Tomtom stuck to the dash. Really happy. My daily routine is get in car, turn key, seatbelt on, hit 'nav' as I pull away and bingo. Really pleased.
 
It has never crashed on me - ever. It is totally stable. It was absolutely brilliant on my tour of Europe and never put a foot wrong.

You can't run Android on it as well - you either have a unit with a Windows backend or an Android backend - you chose when you buy it and there is no way of changing between them once you've selected your unit. I gave Android a lot of consideration but discounted it in the end as I wanted a car audio and nav system rather than a computer and IMHO the Windows version is better for this.
 
jamoor said:
I see, I have had experience of routing from mediocre nav systems (sygic) and it wasn't pleasant.

Can you install other nav software on it if it's no good?
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You can install any Nav system that runs on Windows CE. I use Igo Primo 2.0 and its great.
 
It would seem Dynavin have made some subtle but useful changes to these units. They've fixed the SD card interface, it now looks like the rest of the unit and gone is the horrible early 90's style Amiga looking thing. You also now get a signal strength indicator and battery indicator for bluetooth connected phones on the radio screen and there are a few more options to configure things like how the PDC behaves.

In true Dynavin style though only new customers get these, so whilst I'm out of luck, anyone who buys a newer one will get the improved featureset. It's nothing huge but its little tweaks that would appear to remove much of the few remaining iffy bits :)
 
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