Scenic Motorcycle Navigation 4+

Unbelievably good. I am spending some time tackling classic high alpine routes in the alps in my trusty 993 Porsche, on my own. In days of old I would have bought proper paper maps, planned a route and navigated it with frequent stops. I figured in the modem era I could manage with an iPhone, google maps and Waze, plus off line coverage from proper maps where gps location will position me on the map. Wrong. It’s really hard to set correct way points and even if you do it as you go, the minute you go wrong the route gets recalculated possibly not the way you want, and if you lose data coverage it becomes very difficult indeed. After a day getting seriously off planned route in the Vosges I thought there has to be a better answer. 40 minutes work to find this on line, download it, figure out how to use it and set up a 150 mile route over two classic Alpine passes via tiny roads. Enough free functionality in it to try it and see how it works - but it’s absolutely brilliant for this type of touring. Essentially it sticks to the route you planned in advance, and if you come off it will take you back to it. Lots of other great functionality as well. Top app!

I’m running the Scenic App on an iphone 11 with downloaded maps and plenty of free memory. Sound set to off. We did a trip Malaga - Seville - Cordoba - Grenada - Malaga. Mar 2024. GOOD :- Once I got my head around how it works we used Power Planner for a curvy route for each day. Scenic came up with interesting, empty roads affording spectacular scenery and motorcycling as good as it gets. I’ve tried a number of motorcycle nav apps ( no names but the obvious ones) and I found the Scenic reroute behaviour to be the best of the bunch. The route for each day hung together very well. The annual subscription is good value. NOT SO GOOD :- On two of the four days the app hung midway through the day. It stopped navigating and became unresponsive. The work around is to shut down and restart, reload the saved route and then delete the waypoints behind us. Works fine and takes about three minutes gloves off. In cities we found a lot of display/position lag. This combined with a busy, complex, city environment made it somewhat marginal to use and we reverted to google maps for the last 5km. OVERALL :- This is no city navigation system which google maps does very well. HOWEVER, we enjoyed some really superb riding thanks to Scenic’s route selection process so for the time being it will remain my major trip navigation app of choice. Great value for money and easy to use.

Scenic App is amazing for navigation on short and long trips. It is incredibly easy to set up and very functional. Route and locations can be saved and it records your trips which includes the top speed, average speed and any pauses in the trip etc. You can publicly share your routes and also have a bit of friendly competition with a Rank system for the amount of miles you rack up. My only criticism is that it would be useful to have a speed camera warning feature just to support safety etc. The app does indicate your speed and how much over the limit you are but a warning about upcoming camera would also benefit to ensure you do stick to it, especially in cities.
Could there also be a feature that means when someone calls you on the phone, when the call is finished it sends you straight back to the app? I’ve noticed that it sends the phone onto lock mode so you can no longer see the map. Instructions vocally continues throughout the call so it’s only a minor point.