Droid 3 navigation - wtf?

[Dan.Droid]

Last night, I took a 5 hour drive to a friend's house and decided to try the navigation. I took this exact same trip last year and the droid 1 nav worked flawlessly, so I had high expectations for the droid 3.

I've never seen a more bug-riddled nav app before. It spent the entire trip "searching for gps" and rarely showed us as where we were. It quite often actually showed us on the wrong roada, or even moving the wrong way. It's a good thing I already knew the way, because this thing was useless. Even after making sure all of the gps systems were on.

Sent from my DROID3 using DroidForums

 

[Aiesline]

I had that issue with my first phone. Fortunately I caught it my first week and exchanged for another brand new one and navigation works flawlessly now. Prolly just a faulty gps chip.

 

[ConqSoft]

The nav app isn't buggy, sounds like your GPS is.

 

[lextune]

Been using my Droid 3 for turn-by-turn navigation at least 4 hours a day for a week straight, (I travel for work everyday). All over New England.

Not a single problem.

In fact, it was so far superior to my three year old Navigon GPS that I gave the old warhorse to my Mom.

Sorry to report that it is your phone.

 

[mexizag]

I haven't had any issues either, it was able to find an address that my updated Garmin couldn't and gave me perfect directions.

 

[REMilk]

My wife and I both received the Droid 3 yesterday. I used the Navigation function yesterday on both droids and they worked fine. In fact, (tongue-in-cheek) both Droids picked the same route.

Bob

 

[neilrl79]

My DROID3 constantly searches for gps as well... almost never works.

 

[darkmatter]

I've noticed that every now and then the gps won't initialize. You get searching for gps, but you don't have the icon in the notification bar. Rebooting has always fixed it for me.

Sent from my DROID3 using Tapatalk

 

[militant]

Every GPS enabled phone I've had, (Blackberry, Ally, and D3) Have all done this to some extent. Just the other day my D3 took over 35 minutes without finding a connection. Sometimes the issue is solved by a reboot. Normally it takes me at least a minute or two to find a satellite no matter what, but its usually fine after that. My D3's been about 50/50 so far but I've only used it under a handfull of times, hoping it gets better. I live in the suburbs of NYC in North Jersey. So the issue is not with tall buildings or coverage, I have full reception almost everywhere I go.

 

[XMasterMoronX]

Both my D1 and D3 are working flawlessly (GPS included)

 

[rdoute]

I have found that whenever i get the "searching for GPS" I need to go into the GPS settings and uncheck all of the boxes, than recheck them. I than can go into Navigation and my GPS works. I find that I have to do this about once every 2 weeks, however I only use the Navigation app about once a week or so. It may also be tied to updates, I haven't narrowed it down that far yet.

 

[LT*]

I've noticed that every now and then the gps won't initialize. You get searching for gps, but you don't have the icon in the notification bar. Rebooting has always fixed it for me.

Sent from my DROID3 using Tapatalk

I've had this happen a few times as well.

 

[Fr33dom]

Every GPS enabled phone I've had, (Blackberry, Ally, and D3) Have all done this to some extent. Just the other day my D3 took over 35 minutes without finding a connection. Sometimes the issue is solved by a reboot. Normally it takes me at least a minute or two to find a satellite no matter what, but its usually fine after that. My D3's been about 50/50 so far but I've only used it under a handfull of times, hoping it gets better. I live in the suburbs of NYC in North Jersey. So the issue is not with tall buildings or coverage, I have full reception almost everywhere I go.

My D1 was flawless at getting a GPS signal, my D3 is flawless at needing a restart to get one. Did a factory reset a couple days back and I had to reboot my phone several times yesterday between GPS not working and the market not connecting.

 

[Dan.Droid]

Okay, I'm home now. But while I was out of town, I did a lot of playing with the GPS to try and get it working right. Now that I'm not typing this on the phone with my friends yammering at me about being on my phone too much, I'm going to go through some of what I tried.

First, with-out rebooting, I switched from Navigation to just plain Google Maps. Interestingly enough, Google Maps kept up with not only the road I was on, but my location accurate to within about 2 - 5 seconds drive time. Switching back to Navigation, it went right back to not even knowing what road I was on.

So, I rebooted the phone. The next day, a couple of my friends and I took another road trip from my friend's house in Illinois to Wisconsin's big renaissance festival. It wasn't a huge trip, maybe an hour or so either way, but it was a chance to see if rebooting did the trick. At first, I thought it did. Sitting in the back seat of my friend's truck, the Navigation seemed to be spot on. I was beginning to wonder if it was just the shape of my windshield that was screwing up the phone's ability to properly achieve a GPS sync.

Unfortunately, by the time we got to our destination, the Navigation went screwy again. To make sure it wasn't the truck causing it, I kept the app up as I left the truck. Even standing in the parking lot, with nothing over head, it couldn't get a GPS lock on where I was.

So, yesterday before I left for home, I rebooted again. After starting Navigation, I pulled out and it was still unable to find my location. I kept it on to see if it would sync for the first 2 hours of the trip home. Then I switched to Maps, which once again functioned perfectly, keeping within just a few seconds of where I actually was. I left it on for the next couple hours to see if it would lose sync like Navigation had the day before, but it never did.

Switching back to Navigation for the rest of the trip, it barely even had me on the right road, let alone the right county.

So, what I don't get is, if it's the GPS chip that's bad, how can the Google Maps be so accurate while the Navigation is so..... Not?

 

[Bdog]

My girlfriend and I both have ths problem. I came from D1 and she came from (AT&T's) Aria then the Xperia Play, all of which navigated absolutely flawlessly. That says a lot for an AT&T phone too.I get my D3 first, and it navigates correctly 8% of the time. Girlfriend gets hers, it's only connected once in the 3 weeks we've had it.

My phone got an OTA update, and the navigatin worked the first time. Hasn't since. Until I read rdoute's post and rechecked everything and it just got a connection. I've done so before, but it only worked for a day, so I'm not expecting this to be a miracle cure-all. I've read around, and while the Droid 3 is hit or miss with navigation but perfect in Google Maps (so it isn't our GPS chips), HTC and Charge and other phones have been having Navigation issues as well. Hopefully Google has noticed this and does something about it.