iGO Amigo

June 10th, 2009 nk Posted in GPS | No Comments »

I got my hands on version 8.4.2.85182 of iGO Amigo. Like the version number implies it is supposed to be version 8.4… of iGO. The program is different from version 8.3 of iGO. It uses the same maps, points of interest and the other data, but everything else is different.

The first thing I learned was that Amigo needs to be installed in a new empty directory. Any residual files from an iGO 8.3 installation may disrupt it. The same goes for the Sys.ini file. Amigo will read the iGO file and get confused.

After installing everything and copying the maps and other stuff I decided to test the TTS – I had it installed for iGO and used a modified Susan voice. I also modified the lexicon files to correct some funny stuff like “St Rose” being pronounced “Street Rose”. At this point I discovered that Amigo didn’t like my modified lexicon file. It was running very very slowly – like it was processing something and too busy to find the satellites or respond to commands. Reverting to the original lexicon file resolved that problem. Eventually I added my name modifications to the original file and that worked.

Looks:

The interface (skin) is very nice. I liked both the day and night default colors. The default skin is OK, though I am using one of the several available replacements. The general looks remind me of the MioMap 2008 and Mio Mireo. I like it.

Functionality:

Amigo has a couple of features that most current iGO skins lack. The most important one is the ability to change a rout’s preferences (Fast, Short, etc..) and see the result immediately on the map. There are a couple of iGO skins that do this but none as easy and aesthetically pleasing as the Amigo.

Amigo also lacks a number of features that iGO has. The most annoying is the lack of ability to define excluded roads. The setup menus are much simplified in comparison to iGO and thus have less features.

I also discovered a curious thing: Amigo is sensitive to what city is defined when you search for a street. For example: if I look for a street in the city of North Las Vegas while I am in the city of Las Vegas Amigo may not find the street while iGO has no such problem.

On the MIO Moov 310 I also get only an ABC keyboard – the QWERTY version is absent. This may be a case of using a different data.gro (the equivalent of data.zip used by iGO). I modified the data.gro to display a QWERTY keyboard but a simple substitution of ABC for QWE is not ideal. I got a QWERTY keyboard but with less letters per line and more lines than a standard one – which is kind of confusing, but I find it easier to use than the ABC keyboard.

I will keep using this program for a while to see what else I can learn.

In summary: it seems to be a dumbed down version of iGO with a very nice interface. I would prefer using iGO if somebody made a skin that looks like Amigo.