Potential safety issues with Mapquest Find Me for cell phones due to design flaw in the Ulocate Communications software that provides some of its GPS functions. My advice is don't use the Find Me product until Ulocate fixes this problem

Potential safety issues with Mapquest Find Me for cell phones. Design flaw in the Ulocate Communications software that provides some of its GPS functions
My advice is don't use the Find Me product until Ulocate fixes this problem

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Images are about 20% larger than the actual screen on my Motorola i710 screen. I have found that even with the brightness turn up as high as it will go, and adjusting the contrast, the driving directions screens that have a dark gray background with black letters (left) are impossible to read on all three of our i710 phones while driving when the sun is bright. The screens with the white backgrounds don't have this problem. I have had to pull over to the side of the highway during rush hour traffic several times to read the problem screens, or I sometimes will have to do 2-3 times the number of quick glances to read them. The risks created when pulling off to the side of the road, trying to merge back into traffic, or by having my eyes off the road 2-3 times longer when doing quick glances would be completely eliminated if Ulocate would quit stubbornly refusing to change the dark gray backgrounds to much lighter colors that contrast much better against the black text.

When you purchase cell phones from Nextel or Sprint (they're combined into the same company now), you can optionally order a GPS tracking and navigation product on some of the phones called Mapquest Find Me. The software that works behind the scenes that gives Find Me it's GPS capabilities is from another company called Ulocate Communications. When the Ulocate product first came out, they marketed their services directly to the public. I was one of their beta testers and was originally impressed with the product. I've been using it for about two years.

However, as time passed, I started noticing a big problem with it. On days where the sun was very bright, it caused so much glare on the phone's display screen that it was literally impossible for me to read some of the screens Ulocate was producing. The problem was mainly with the screens that give step-by-step driving directions, and that use a dark gray background color with dark black text. The background color alternates between white and dark gray to differentiate between each step in the driving instructions. The text is always black. The problem with using dark gray backgrounds with black text shouldn't be hard for Ulocate to figure out. It's common sense. Which of the 4 text/background combinations below are the hardest to read?

I originally reported this problem to Ulocate approximately 1.5 to 2 years ago when I was still a beta tester for their product. I was told way back then that my comments were being considered but nobody ever responded back to me who was in a position to do something about it. Any contact I've had with them about this has always been from lower level employees, or people in departments who have no ability to fix the problem. The actual decision makers have stubbornly refused to contact me at all about it in spite of the fact that I have complained about this several times during the past two years. A month or two ago someone at Ulocate finally acknowledged one of my e-mails and contacted me. She said she wasn't one of the people who makes decisions about product changes like that, but that she'd forward my comments to the right people. To date, nobody has responded to that request, and the problem persists.

I believe this product, at least when it's used on my type of phone (a Motorola i710), can be dangerous to use under bright sunlight conditions. When the sun is bright and I'm trying to read the driving directions Ulocate is feeding to my Find Me software, I have literally had to pull over to the side of the highway many times, sometimes during rush hour traffic, and pull back the plastic cover over the phone's display screen to read what the driving directions were. This represents the first potential safety issue with the product. While I'm sitting there I could get rear-ended. It's also sometimes difficult to merge back into highway speed traffic from a dead stop on the side of the road, especially during rush hour traffic.

In some cases I am able to decipher the problem screens in bright sunlight conditions while I'm still driving, but I usually have to take 2-3 times more quick glances at the screen before I'm able to read what it says. That means my eyes are off the road 2-3 times longer. Therein lies the second potential safety issue. I have never had this problem while reading the screens with the white background and black letters. I can normally read them very quickly after doing just 1 - 3 quick glances (the same way I would check my speedometer, odometer, gauges, compass, etc.).

It was very difficult to simulate what I actually see in bright light conditions on my phone with the digital pictures above. I can say with certainty that the problem screens are more difficult to read in bright sunlight conditions than what the picture on the left suggests.

We have decided that the Mapquest Find Me product isn't safe enough for us to continue using. I would encourage others to avoid using it too until Ulocate gets more serious about listening (and responding) to their customers, and they fix this problem for all cell phone models that use their software. We were stuck with it before, but now our Nextel contract has expired and we're switching to Verizon in a few days. Verizon has a similar GPS tracking and navigation product called VZ Navigator. In addition to having some nice features that Mapquest Find Me (along with Ulocate) doesn't have, the VZ Navigator screens use a much better color combination than Ulocate does. Look at the color schemes they use (see the link below) and see how much easier they are to read compared to the picture on the left at the top of this page.

If Ulocate ever decides to use some common sense and fix this problem in an acceptable way, and they let me know they've done it, I'll report that on this page.