Directions Tool

August 2021

Directions is a simple step-by-step navigation tool. Select your mode of transportation, search for your destination, and follow along. Directions make it a little easier to go light with the peace of mind of navigational assistance.

Introducing the Directions Tool from The Light Phone on Vimeo

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Live Navigation (GPS mode)

By default, the Directions tool will use live navigation, which we call GPS Mode, for walking & driving trips. The GPS follows you along the route, updating your distance until the next turn, and recalculating automatically if you make a wrong turn. GPS Mode also has a voice command option.

From the main step-by view you can access settings, check the current time, remaining trip time/distance, battery, and the next step with a distance meter and text description. You can view a list of all of the steps or a map.

Map View

There are two ways to view the map, “road view” which is zoomed into your current location, and “route view” which gives you an overview of the entire trip trajectory.

Due to the nature of the E-ink screen, we created a formula for managing the rate of screen refreshes based on the speed of your movement. The screen will increase its refresh rate as you move faster. Driving in a car means a refresh about every two seconds; if still, the refresh rate will be closer to ten seconds.

There is not a way to move around on the map. It is fixed to either the ‘road’ and ‘route’ views, and you can’t pinch to zoom, which would not work well with the E-ink screen refresh rate.

Offline Mode

Offline Mode is an option for using the Directions tool without the GPS. You can choose Offline Mode in the settings for when you’re concerned about saving battery or data. Offline Mode works great as a simple reference. Offline mode opens to a list of steps for your trip. There is still a map view, but it is a slide show of the different steps of the trip displayed on the map, rather than following your pin.

Public Transit Mode

Selecting Public Transit as your Mode of Transportation is like using the Offline Mode setting. The GPS is only used to find your initial location, but not for following you along the trip.

Public transit routes will include subways, regional trains, and bus lines. The arrival time of the train or bus will be displayed under its icon in the left column. The estimated time of arrival is displayed under the current time.

Searching Destination

You can search by the name of an establishment, an address, or more common words like “cafe”, “pizza”, or “gas” for instance. Select your destination from the search results, confirm your mode of transportation, and press START to begin calculating the route.

Voice Commands

Directions Driving Example from The Light Phone on Vimeo

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Initial Setup

When you first download the tool or power on your phone, the GPS is coming from a “cold start” and will take some time to get an initial connection. We begin priming the GPS once you install Directions. This process happens in the background automatically, assuming your phone has sufficient charge.

TIP: It works well if you leave your phone on, and connected to the charger overnight for priming. The GPS priming does have a small impact on overall battery life - this can be disabled on the device in Settings > Preferences > Tools > Directions.

Privacy

Many of the ‘free’ apps for navigation thrive off of user data. We build all of the tools for the LightOS ourselves to ensure a thoughtful and private experience. Choosing to install the Directions tool is the first time that your Light Phone II will be using the built-in GPS. It was important to us to make sure we worked with a navigation partner that would support building our tool privately, and we’re working with HERE for the navigation logic. HERE is behind many built-in car navigations as well.

Light does not have access to any logs of your trip/location history, and these are not stored on the device either. Trips are handled privately without user identification using our navigation partner.

The Directions tool is the best example of the potential for the LightOS thus far. Even though it’s not free for Light, since there is a monthly cost per user to build the tool in this way, the directions tool is something we consider to be an important aspect of owning a Light Phone II. Our users will not pay anything to download and use the tool, and they will not sacrifice their location data for the convenience of free navigation.