2010 Mazdaspeed 3: How To Scroll Around, Step 1...

It's worked fine when I used it. The compass is more easily accessible because you can use it at all times; the scrolling is locked while the car is in motion, like a number of other features. While I wish most of those features weren't locked, in the US I doubt that they'll ever remove those legal nannies. I also personally have found the screen size to be a poor argument since I've had no issues seeing anything and it's right in one's line of site.

Any time people complain about this system I remember it could be worse; it's been easy to use for me, is fully integrated (I HATE running power cables/etc for add-on systems) and came as part of a package I would have gotten anyways. Compared to most factory systems, it's way cheaper.

In comparison, I recently used the nav in my coworker's '09 Fit, which cost him $1,850. The graphics were terrible, most things were still locked out, as it's touchscreen doing anything on it while driving is far more unsafe, and it's far out of your line of site if you're actually looking at it. .

After-market systems will always be more cost-effective, but I think that for the price that this system really ends up costing it really isn't that bad.

whitty1: It has full voice prompts, along with showing detailed information at freeway intersections, zooming in on normal turns, etc. It does not, however, have the ability to say street names, unfortunately. It will show the name of the street you're supposed to turn onto on the top of the screen, but going from my Garmin or my Nexus One's Google Nav did have me missing street name pronunciation. (Even if it's pretty humorously wrong at least half the time.)

Thanks for the clarification penboy. Yeah I do get a kick out of my Garmin's way of pronouncing some words!

That area of town has more right angles than an M.C. Escher painting.

penboy - Those "legal nannies" are Mazda's decisions, not US law.

Mitsubishi at least understands that you might have a front passenger with upper ambulatory mobility. The Outlander's navi has a joystick to the right of the screen. You can scroll the map at any time, including while driving. When done there's an on-screen "back" button that instantly returns to the regular display. Since the Outlander includes free traffic it's convenient to see how much further a backup might go on. And there's a Scale/Zoom rocker switch to zoom in & out; it works in every display mode.

I used the joystick the other day to find suitable side streets to avoid a construction-related backup.

There's actually little that doesn't work while driving and from what I can recall none of it is navi-related. Watching a DVD isn't allowed though the audio can continue. Initial pairing of a BT device & importing the phone book can only be done while stopped. That's about it. You can even create & edit playlists while moving.

Pre-Outlander I was using a Magellan portable GPS and always got a kick out of how it pronounced things. It was very obvious that they only tried to synthesize speech from name spellings and didn't keep a phonetic database of common location names. Illinois was pronounces "Illinaw."

I've had no problems with the built-ion navi. That's probably because I mentally prepared for a compromise. I refuse to use an aftermarket unit, for the same reasons someone else already said: cord management and placement. The benefits of having it built in, with speaking directions that mute the stereo and steering wheel controls far outweigh the negatives. It's true, the graphics are not great. The directions are not always the best. And the points of interest list is pretty incomplete. But I knew that going in. A built-in system will always have its compromises. The question is whether the pros outweigh the cons; for me they do.

I've also never had any problems with the built-in navigation. I use it maybe once a week, usually for some spur of the moment place I want to go. Before this, I had (actually still have) a high-end Tom Tom that lived in a drawer in the house most of the time that was rarely in the car when I needed it unless it was an intentional trip to unfamiliar places. And when it was in the car for those spur of the moment decisions, I had to pull over to set it up, boot it up, and then get going praying I never had to control it while driving because that meant impaling myself on the steering wheel to reach it at the base of the windshield (or the easier and safer way of pulling over, pulling it off its base, and then fiddling with it). Let's just say I much prefer the built-in unit even with its compromises.

I'm glad the system doesn't attempt to speak road names to me. Here in southern California, what starts off as humorous gets old really quick as other systems attempt to pronounce our many Spanish and Native American street names like Hueneme, Ojai, La Cienega, Camino de la Reina, Paseo de los Americanos. Some of them were so bad I had to read it off the screen because I couldn't figure out what it was trying to pronounce. It would be a very nice feature once they perfect speech synthesis.

The Mazda system isn't nearly as nice as, say, the Sync navigation system in my parent's Raptor. But it was part of a $1,195 package as opposed to $2,000 by itself in the Ford, so I'll cut it some slack. Mazda could have made it a lot nicer for more money, but something tells me we would be reading a post per week about how that system wasn't worth the extra price!

And I do like this nav system a whole lot better than the really expensive factory system we had in the S60 R we had for a while. That system was extremely slow, inaccurate, had really poor resolution, had controls on the back on the steering wheel, and could do even less things while in motion. Come to think of it, we haven't read about how bad the XC60's system is in a while!

Call me Luddite, but I have yet to develop a need for a nav system and I travel a lot for work. I think they're like PDAs/iPhones/Blackberries: something we can do without, but extremely useful when you have one. Even one like the speed3's with it's somewhat clunky interface. I think, for the quality of the unit and screen size, it should be a standard feature. I can't see paying a grand for it.