Simrad: Companion for Boaters

A very good, well designed Chart Recorder and Depth/fish finder. Being new, it took me a few trips to master the many options, I’ve just scratched the surface of its versatility, luckily I have many friends that use such names as Garmin, Lawrence, Faruno and Humminbird, to name a few, and functionality seems similar. The ability to access this functionality remains the challenge. Some details are difficulty to drill down and access, but my knowledge grows and I’m pleased with the capabilities and operation. Looking forward to integrating a radar function - ease of add-on was one reason I chose this brand. Appreciate the engineering and the durability.

2nd Update now that I’ve used their products for more than a year, the app and my NSX unit are fantastic. However, customer service is atrocious. It is shocking that their owners, Brunswick, would allow this to continue. On a scale of 1 to 10, customer service gets zero. Update, seems to be working fine now. when it works, it’s a great app. Previously—-Finally got a message from CMap (which is the underlying mapping app). They said there had been a data leak and they’re working on it. Just took a long time for them to get this information out. Original message App doesn’t work any longer, I’ve tried deleting and reinstalling. Cannot login. One communication a week ago on the website saying they were problems. No further communication even though I’m a premium subscriber, they have my email etc. Called customer services and was told I was 12th in line. All they had to do is send out an email and follow up with an update every few days. Nothing wrong with a plotting feature on the boat, it’s just the iPhone app fell into a dark hole and doesn’t work.

I used to love this app. I used to recommend it to my friends as an important navigation aid. My Go7 has some navigation, but it won’t auto route. I bought this app because of the ease to navigate to a waypoint. It used to be this easy. Go to waypoints, pick a waypoint, select Goto and then boom you had an autoroute in deep channels from your location to where you want to go. For some reason that feature went away. Now, to get the same functionality you must create a route. That doesn’t sound bad, but these are the required steps. Go to waypoints, pick your waypoint, pick route to, swap order (app assumes you are leaving waypoint ???), pick current location for start point, save route, name the route, click done, navigate to routes menu, select route, finally click Goto and you can begin navigation. So what used to require 3 steps now requires 11 steps. ELEVEN!!! Product manager what were you thinking!? The developers response is fun and subtle play of words. I wish I was naive and willing to accept such misdirection. My review is based on the removal of the “Go to” feature. The auto-routing feature between waypoints works exactly as it always has. The “Go To” feature, which is to go to a waypoint from your current location is gone. I’ve reduced my rating to one star for not listening.