I've been a long-time advocate of smartphone over dedicated units for satnav duties, but two niggles remain: reliable on-board power supply and performance in extreme temperatures. Looking at the latest offerings from Garmin and TomTom, I see they both have the ability to select and control music from smartphones, but I suspect that only covers music stored on the phone, as opposed to music apps such as Spotify and BBC Sounds. Anybody got experience of such usage?
I use my Android phone (Galaxy S9) with my Zumo 590 which is quite long in the tooth for a GPS. I either play music off the SD card in the sat nav or can stream Amazon Music, but control that from the screen of the Garmin. This control, unlike MP3s on the SD card, is only pause or next/previous track, you have to queue up the playlist on the phone app first too. With on-board MP3s you can see the track info on screen etc. I can only guess that Spoitify work the same way. Using the limited menu that displays to the right of the map I can pause or move to next track without having to delve into the menus, the pause and FFWD buttons are just there. Anything else would necessitate a stop.
Interesting. Both offerings say they can issue Siri or Google commands to the phone. In theory, i should be able to use that as I do now, to initiate the playing of music from my iTunes library or to stream from my radio app. Anyone tried this?
There are four options in the media player menu on my Zumo MP3 (internal music library in memory or on SD card) iPhone or iPoad Bluetooth (what I use with my Android phone) Line in (there's a trailing jack on the Garmin bike loom, well there was, I cut mine off) Looks like the 2nd one offers a dedicated Apple connection with the prospect of better control and feedback from the phone. However, I'll wager that this is not a wireless connection as there is (in my case was) also a female USB socket on the Garmin bike loom that is attached to the cradle. Maybe the more recent models will do this wireless stylee?
