The phone cubbyhole is more plague than profit, when using the phone as a navigation device in conjunction with the BMW Connected app.
1. The cradle it sits in is not charged, therefore you need a short charging lead.
2. It is a tight fit for any large (popular) large screen smart phones. This means it is too easy to touch the smart phone’s screen, which can turn the app off.
3. Whether it is due to the phone’s horizontal orientation in the cubbyhole or, the mass of electronics that maybe sits close to the cubbyhole or maybe some simple metal work being close by, I don’t know, but…. The phone will very often lose its GPS position and make bizarre recalculations, not helped as you can’t turn automatic recalculation off.
I gave up using the cubbyhole completely. Instead, I just put the phone into my tank bag. This is close enough to the bike’s Wi-Fi receiver, so it allows the detailed mapping and route to still be displayed. More importantly, my tank bag is powered, which means I can power my phone. This is very important as the BMW Connected app is very power hungry. It will flatten even a modern smart phone’s battery in pretty short order. I am writing to BMW to tell them of the problem. Putting the phone into the powered tank bag, solved all the problems. It was 100% reliable thereafter.
On a brighter note, the phone (in the tank bag) held its GPS position much better than my XT, which I was running in parallel to the BMW Connected app / TFT screen combination on my 1600. The XT lost satellite connections quite often in the narrow valleys of the Ardennes. Perhaps it was not helped that it was very rainy, with maybe the deep clouds and rain, breaking up the satellites’ signal, as can sometimes happen with a Sky TV dish. Or maybe the signal was just ‘bouncing around’?
1. The cradle it sits in is not charged, therefore you need a short charging lead.
2. It is a tight fit for any large (popular) large screen smart phones. This means it is too easy to touch the smart phone’s screen, which can turn the app off.
3. Whether it is due to the phone’s horizontal orientation in the cubbyhole or, the mass of electronics that maybe sits close to the cubbyhole or maybe some simple metal work being close by, I don’t know, but…. The phone will very often lose its GPS position and make bizarre recalculations, not helped as you can’t turn automatic recalculation off.
I gave up using the cubbyhole completely. Instead, I just put the phone into my tank bag. This is close enough to the bike’s Wi-Fi receiver, so it allows the detailed mapping and route to still be displayed. More importantly, my tank bag is powered, which means I can power my phone. This is very important as the BMW Connected app is very power hungry. It will flatten even a modern smart phone’s battery in pretty short order. I am writing to BMW to tell them of the problem. Putting the phone into the powered tank bag, solved all the problems. It was 100% reliable thereafter.
On a brighter note, the phone (in the tank bag) held its GPS position much better than my XT, which I was running in parallel to the BMW Connected app / TFT screen combination on my 1600. The XT lost satellite connections quite often in the narrow valleys of the Ardennes. Perhaps it was not helped that it was very rainy, with maybe the deep clouds and rain, breaking up the satellites’ signal, as can sometimes happen with a Sky TV dish. Or maybe the signal was just ‘bouncing around’?
