| lordtakuban |
10-12-2012 08:47 AM |
Pandora works great. With Slacker, BeSpoke starts up and immediately gives an error similar to "Can't verify slacker account" or something like that. Then, about 10 to 15 minutes later, it magically is able to verify and all is ... better.
I tested the Address search feature on my way home from work yesterday. Here's how it went:
I hit the talk icon, said "Find an address". It got that and then prompted me for the address. I gave my address. ... "Sorry, I didn't catch that. Please repeat it". Gave it again, ... "Sorry, I ...", again, then again. Then 3 more times. Finally on the 7th try, it got it. I speak very clearly and my address is very simple. I gave the city and state with it since earlier testing indicated that you have to since the address search doesn't take into account your current GPS-based city/state. Once it recognized the address, I saw that it was correct. So I hit "Yes"
It drew my route on the screen on top of a grey grid (The map was being displayed when I started the whole process). 2 blocks later, the map came in again and was zoomed out farther than it was before requesting the address. I zoomed in, and kept checking to see if Slacker would come in whenever I was at a traffic light. Then I noticed the route wasn't showing up anymore. So I opened the slider and clicked the refresh-looking icon. That put the green outline back on.
The way home from my location was basically 2 roads, then my neighborhood. But I just wanted to check it out and see if it called out any turn by turn info. It did not speak any of the directions, but the route was at least outlined. That wasn't so bad.
Then, Slacker was able to connect! OMFG! I might actually have a working app in my car at about 2/3 of the way home. It was almost exciting. I made my 1 turn, which the route had plotted correctly on the map and continued down the last main road. Slacker cut out twice for a little bit, then came back on during the 1 song it played. Then the whole BeSpoke app crashed hard and closed. Frustrated, I switched over to the Pandora app since my phone was still connected and everything worked great on Pandora the rest of the way home. No interruptions and I was even skipping tracks with good speed and virtually no buffering.
BeSpoke: What an absolute Piece of f-ing garbage. I will definitely be putting my other Pioneer HU (AVIC-x920bt) in the car to have a real GPS and Pandora and it will actually work. Now I just need to find the time on a weekend to swap everything out and put the USB/Aux connections and microphone in the stock locations.
BeSpoke could have been so much better. But it completely fails at life. Even if it actually worked, the inconvenience of having to plug your phone in every time you get in the car, start the app, remove the phone when you get out, ... etc. is enough to make it suck pretty hard. When you factor in that the app is buggy and not all that great, it's even worse.
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