The Background:
Ather invited a few of the Bangalore and Chennai owners to have a BETA preview of this OTA update. I was excited because this was the first time they were bringing on board the user community to do a BETA test and the tech team was super responsive to every little feedback that we provided.
For those who were part of the 4th Owners meet, this wouldn’t be a surprise. But for others, especially those who use the navigation a lot - this will be a pretty good upgrade - both in terms of functionality and stability.
My Thoughts:
Ather has introduced the “Drop Pin” navigation option. This allows you to point at a location on the map and initiate turn-by-turn instructions. I tried this out a couple of times and it never failed even once. This is especially useful when you get weird addresses that don’t show up in the app search bar or landmarks that just don’t seem to exist where they are meant to be!
The next item was the stability update. We’ve all faced laggy touchscreen or just plain non-responsive touchscreen in the navigation screen. Ather seems to have done a lot of cleanup in this area and for the time I used it, it worked like butter on a non-stick pan! - very smooth screen navigation as we moved around the map as well in the pinch-zoom function.
However, it did seem to lag slightly when navigating through map sections that had not loaded fully - ala the Vodafone network!
On a side note, screen restarts seems to have reduced drastically for me, save for 1 freeze - which was ironically during the Sunday Owners Ride.
And another biggie was the update to the Cloud Sync. The bike now syncs to the cloud every 2 hours or so. This means that your battery percentage is updated on the app every 2 hours from the current “Last screen on” time.
Ofcourse, like always we had a lot of feedback and pointed out areas that can be further improved.
For now, I am appreciative of the team going a step further and involving the larger community into its update/upgrade testing. This helps since we can give them varied feedback as each owner has different expectations, riding style and usage of the bike.