I am taking it for granted that you have got a 16:9 colour screen MkIV navigation system ... factory installed.

1) What you have done so far is the right thing to do, but it is only the first step: you have enabled perspective view through the navigation service mode. Now a "perspective view" choice will be present in the user view menu, alongside "North up" and "heading up" that you had before. You only need to go to the view menu and select perspective view as your choice.

2) At times my nav also takes long to get to the map-navigation screen. In my case this is related to the quality of the backup copy DVD I am using. It would seem the MkIV reader is quite exigent with regards to the quality of the burn it is reading. I guess some times it is a matter of lens alignment or signal strength but some times it is simply the DVD is corrupt, and some files or directories are not correct or missing. I burn a new map DVD almost every week, in order to update speed cameras POI, and I have gone through quite a few of these situations (I use DVD+RW so I can re-use the media). Try your original DVD (if you are currently using a copy) and see if this improves your reading times. If you insist in using a copy (as I do) check the copy against the original for corrupt or missing files. It happens more frequently than you would think.

3) Set a destination on the destination screen, go all the way in setting your destination, until the lady inside issues her first guidance instruction. Then stop guidance and return to map view if not already there. When you exit and re-enter GPS navigation mode you should return to the screen that was active when you left, except if the system went askew and has had trouble reading the map DVD. In this case the system seems to loose the last destination and returns to the destination screen. This issue might therefore be related to issue #2.

4) If you refer to POI icons coming up on the map view this happens only for one category at a time and only after you have gone through the process of selecting a POI in said category. In fact you do not need to go all the way and select a specific POI as destination, but you should go as far as is needed to get the POI list in the screen. You can then select one of them as destination (if that is what you want) or back up all the way to map screen. You will see the map on the screen is now dotted with a series of POI icons depicting the position in the map of all POIs in range, in the category you were listing. This only happens for resolution equal or greater than 5km. If no POIs are shown maybe none are in range.

The BMW nav system is quite moody and not the best for user friendliness. I own the thing for more than two years now and I still discover new “features” from time to time. Do not despair.

Regards