I use Google Maps navigation on all my devices and up until last week the Priv had been fine. But while on vacation last week for the Christmas holiday the Google Maps on the Priv went completely FUBAR with errors I haven't seen since using a Tom Tom on my Treo 650. I was visiting San Diego and the first thing I noticed was Google Maps was having huge lag issues displaying the initial route after selecting a location and hitting the nav icon (car or walking). The lag was pervasive, once it took almost two minutes for the map to "zoom" into the Nav mode view (tilted map). Once I was sure the phone had locked up, I was pressing the home button, back button, nothing worked, then suddenly it started to zoom into Nav mode but then all the presses I had made took over (flipped out to the home screen, back, etc. - beyond frustrating when you're trying to get somewhere!). Nothing worse than the wife sitting in the passenger's seat saying, "do you want me to just get my iPhone out?".
If I waited patiently the thing would finally start working, but the map location, rotation and updates were noticeably slow, and while driving at freeway speeds the map would suddenly zoom in like it thought I had slowed down/stopped and then zoom back out once it detected my actual speed again. Oddly the voice queues were "on time", and sometimes far ahead of what was displayed on the Priv's screen. Also all other software, menu navigation was impacted when Maps navigation was running; if I tried to pop out to start Google Music or Sirius, or even pull down the notification tray, everything was horribly laggy. Once I shut down Navigation, everything was back to normal.
Lag wasn't the only problem, several times Maps thought my location was in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, or it thought I was at the last location I went to. After a couple of minutes it would update, but that's something I haven't seen on an Android phone in years.
A couple of times I noticed the GPS icon was flashing, so I'm not sure if this was a software problem or something is wrong with the Priv's GPS hardware. Everything was fine a couple of weeks ago, but since then we've had the much needed software upgrade from BlackBerry (I'm on an AT&T carrier phone, so I got it two weeks after everyone else) and I believe there was a Google Maps update as well.
I was tempted to reset the phone, but I decided to I uninstalled Maps (basically back to the "firmware" version), rebooted, then installed the latest Maps updates, and then rebooted again. So far in my testing Navigation seems to be working as expected again; I can select a location in maps, hit the nav icon and it immediately zips into navigation mode. Of course I didn't think of this until yesterday when I got home from my trip
Hopefully that's all it is; I'm a little nervous as a couple of days ago I pulled up Uber and it flat out refused to recognize where I was; it thought I was at my last destination and I had to manually select my pickup location. There was an update to the Uber app I downloaded a couple of days ago and I haven't had any issues with it since then. I really hope it was just some software update issues I experienced and there's nothing physically wrong with the GPS hardware in my Priv. Everything seems to be OK now, if the issues come back you'll hear from me
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