Making Custom Landmarks?

[Stephanie]

Now that I have my F700 looking and working more or less the way I want, I'm trying to achieve something that (I think) should be a fairly basic GPS function.

 

In my old gps, I had about 60 'Landmarks' set up, with all different icons. I have some businesses, some friends and family, some vacation areas, etc etc. Now with my old GPS V I basically drove to these places, then pushed a button to save the coordinates as a landmark. Then I could name them and put an icon on them. With a Sony NavU that I played with for a week, you could type in an address, it would find the address, then you could save it as a custom landmark and assign a name and icon. Both the GPS V and the Nav-U let you retrieve your address book and search through them to select them as a destination.

 

I've just finished spending time today to type out into a file on my computer, all these landmarks from my GPS V. I have names, and Lat/Long coordinates. What I want to do, is get this stuff into my F700 such that I can a) plot routes to these places easily (as in, not more than a dozen taps of the screen, ideally a half dozen). I want to see them on my map, but I don't want to see all the built-in POI stuff. c) I want to apply different icons to them, there's probably 5 or 6 'categories' that I can limit them to.

 

I had hoped that the Avic Feeds program would let me do this, but this seems not to be the case. It was easy enough to import my landmarks into the POI editor, but it looks like I can ony use one icon for everything? My old Garmin GPS V came with software that let me assign different icons to different landmarks.

 

All that aside, I'm not even sure I want to set my landmarks up as POIs. It doesn't look like you can search POIs by name or category - only based on where you are, a route you are already following, or a destination you've already set. It seems more like Favorites are what I 'want', except favorites don't appear to have icons, and don't appear on the map at all. Plus there's a ridiculous limitation of only 30 favorites, and you can't search them, you have to page through them screen by screen.

 

The more I think of it, the "Contacts" should be seriously addressed by Pioneer - you need to be able to edit them on the unit, give them an address and an icon. They should appear on the map. It is the 'address book' that the Sony Nav-U had, and would be the custom landmarks that the GPS V had. For something to take up 1/3 of the top menu of the F-series, it needs to do more than show coloured blobs that you can do nothing more than poke at to make phone calls.

 

Sorry if this comes across as a stupid question, but is there anything in the F-series that works like Landmarks? Where I can bookmark a spot, give it a custom icon, have it appear on the map, and easily select it from a list that's restricted to only the landmarks I've put in it? The GPS V had these features like 5 years ago...

 

Thanks!