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Saturday, April 04, 2015

Navionics is a Joke

We've been hearing that Navionics, on a tablet computer, is everyone's favorite choice for navigation. People simply rave about it. So we thought we'd try it, mainly to solve a problem we'd been having in the local Wednesday night races where we were having a hard time getting exactly to a lon/lat point. Having Judy go down to the chart table and give us headings and distances just wasn't working. We needed an on-deck solution.

Unfortunately. the new Navionics we just downloaded to our Nexus tablet is mostly useless for our purposes. In fact I say it is a child's toy, not a navigation tool. For example:You want to enter waypoints at specific lon/lat postions, then navigate to them? You can't. Waypoints can only be created while creating route, and then you "tap" the screen. You cannot specify the lon/lat, and you can't even tell what lon/lat you tapped on. Useless. For example: You have a route and you want to insert a waypoint to bypass a rock or a point of land? You can't. Just cant be done. For example, you want to delete a waypoint in a route? You can't. Oh, you can start deleting waypoints from the end back to where you want to make a change, then start forward again, what a joke! For example: You search for a lon/lat position then save it as a "favorite" then want to navigate to it? You can't. Or even display the name you just gave to that spot? You can't.

Navionics seems to have done a good job integrating twitter and facebook, and they have gotten a lot of fluffy gushing reviews, but not from sailors or navigators. The navionics software for android is not a serious tool. It makes me wonder about the people who love it so much. If anyone has solutions to these issues, I'd love to hear them