I guess I don’t see what you mean. I find there are several reasons that my iPhone isn’t the best for us while navigating. Perhaps I should say that we have to travel more than 4K miles by car at least 3 sometimes 4x a year. That’s a lot of time looking at a little screen.
Why do I want to use an iPad - easy:
1) 10” screen vs 5.8”. About twice the screen space. So much easier to use while driving.
2) My spouse drives and I actually use my iPhone while he’s driving. His screen is even smaller than mine.
3) It’s easier for us to have a device that dedicated to leaving in the car while traveling. We both take our phones w/ us on every stop and leave the tablet in the car. We both have health issues and leaving the phone in the car isn’t an option - even for a quick pit stop. It’s worked much better for us than reconnecting and remounting every time we get back in and get settled. It isn’t a huge difference, but it’s one that my spouse especially, prefers.
4) I use the hotspot on my phone to connect my tablet. Been doing this ever since we started using a tablet. Don’t find it’s a huge difference in connection vs direct cellular, actually. The truth is, the iOS implemendation of hotspots is much better/stronger/more elegant than the Android version. I used to be a huge Android fan but this is definitely a win for iOS on hotspots - including the fact that both devices “see” the secondary device as being connected to the hotspot vs just another WiFi connection. I don’t need to buy anything else for that - I just connect my iPad to my iPhone and it uses the iPhone’s cellular connectivity. This way I also don’t have to pay for a separate cellular connection for my iPad which I’ll use just a few months out of the year.
I know for most people, you’re both right, an iPhone would likely be the perfect solution - especially if traveling on one’s own. And if this was the case, selling both my phone and iPad to fund an iPhone Max for the larger screen might be the best and most elegant option. If it were just me, I’d probably go with this minimalist solution and I’d probably love it. But given these other issues including my spouse having more difficulty with sight than I do, the larger screen simply is a must. He cannot switch from watching the road driving to seeing the next turn, what lane to be in, what the speed limit is, and then what lane he needs to be after that next turn, all on a phone size screen. Glancing back and forth between the road and such a small screen is just not something he can easily do. Especially not when we have to drive for 4 days straight. It’s just too much. If we had a built in screen on the car for either CarPlay or Android Auto, we’d use that.
The iOS ecosystem tends to handle hotspot connection automatically, once you connect one time. We’ve had a lot of issues using the Samsung Tab S2 where it was a total pain to reconnect. When we’d realize we’re not connected & therefore not getting the most accurate data, we’re constantly having to leave the maps app (often while coming up to critical junctions) going back and forth between the settings of the phone and tablet turning off WiFi, turning on hotspot, turning off WiFi on the tablet, resetting and starting WiFi again so it can connect to the Hotspot. Also, because Android doesn’t see the Hotspot as different from a WiFi connection, we got hit with tons of extra cellular data because even through I had turned off all auto updating on WiFi on every app everywhere I could find, it would still download stuff in the background. Since iOS sees the Hotspot connection as separate from WiFi, it’s not as difficult on this.
The Tab S2 also was really laggy, choppy, and crashed often. I was surprised at this because I figured it should be more than enough to run navigation smoothly but it wasn’t a great fit. We also got sent on a number of wrong directions which was an oddity that we’d not encountered before. That may not be the S2 directly but it just wasn’t a good experience with the crashes and lags and loss of connection.
You both gave beautiful, elegant and very reasonable information. For most people, it would be the best option. And I’m grateful that you both shared it. We just happen to have a different use case and need the larger screen and other stuff. It looks like for under $100 we can have the iPad running navigation for us. If it works well, we can sell the Tab S2 and probably make back what we have in the GPS, or part of it, perhaps.
Anyway, that’s the reasoning for us. Again, thanks so much for sharing. I know it might not matter for most people but it’s what we need for these long trips.
