I have now had the bike about 5 weeks and its due for its first service next week. I believe I am getting to grips with the TFT and BMW App so here is a summary of what I have learned.
First of all I have a Samsung Galaxy 10 and a Sena SRL, I also have a Sena RC3 remote control on the handlebar.
1. A dedicated phone is a good idea, you can put it in the bike and leave it all day, it will stay charged. If you are taking your phone in and out of the pocket you might not seat it properly and you could end up with a discharged phone. The wireless charging will put a bit of charge into your phone but not much.
2. Connectivity is an issue and I wrote to BMW. My bike is on TFT version 5 and needs upgraded to version 7 which will happen next week, I wonder what happens if newer TFT updates are released and my bike is not due in for a service. Anyway, BMW wrote back to me and I followed their instructions.
I did 100 miles on Wednesday and for the first time I had no connectivity issues. You need to go to this site and follow the instructions.
https://dontkillmyapp.com
3. Audio is good, particularly radio. I can run a radio App on my bike phone and its far better than the dedicated radio that I had on 2 RT's and 3 K16's. I can swop stations using the wonder wheel. But I cannot swop between the radio and music. I gotta stop, kill the radio App and start the music App, when I do this I can swop between tracks.
4. Navigation is good, but you don't have traffic re-routing or speed camera warnings. You do get lane control on little arrows, hard to see but they are there.
5. I have purchased MyRouteApp and highly recommend it, I can plan a route on my laptop and drop to streetview to see what the road looks like. When I finish the route it is already on the Bike phone and I simply download it and the BMW App will open to import it. However, the BMW App will make its own calculations so waypoints are essential. MyRouteApp has a max of 350 waypoints and I have asked BMW how many waypoints their App will support.
6. Export of the route you have ridden from the BMW App is a simple track, very bland.
7. The BMW App respects waypoints, but will not show them and you cannot modify an imported route.
8. I don't plan to use the BMW App for any route planning, its simply not easy on a phone and the POI's do not exist (apart from fuel).
9. To see a POI when on a route or just riding you have to be on the bike. It will bring up POI's and you can navigate e.g. to fuel or parking.
10. The TFT will navigate to a waypoint, it will not show it or read it out e,g, "Approaching Fuel Stop on the left" which is what the Garmin stuff did. If you miss a way point it will re-calculate the route automatically to either take you back to the last one or skip to the next one, I am OK with that. I don't have to push a button to skip a waypoint.
11. Phoning someone is easy, provided you have them on your recent call list, finding someone while riding a motorbike is not fun, so ring your favourite people and they will be on your call list. Phone call quality is excellent.
12. Don't forget to put the volume on the phone to Max, use the buttons on the phone.
13. When on Map view, i.e. Map on main screen and directions in small screen, you can push the wonder wheel right to bring up a menu including repeat instruction, very good.
14. When on Map view, you can push the wonder wheel left and then use the wonder wheel to scroll in or out of the map, very good as well.
I have worked out why the TFT, BMW App, Music, Phone calls, Route Planning were bugging me, its because I had taken this stuff for granted and I had to change things, understand new stuff, work through problems until I got it sorted and now I think I have, which means I can put this behind me and move on to enjoy the bike.
Hopefully this summary and the contribution of others will make the learning curve a bit less.