A couple of observations after 2 months of ownership
 

Having driven my X5 for 2 months, I found a few things that may not be obvious during test drives and such. These observations may not have much value but here they go:

1. A nice feature of cruise control is that it lowers the speed in curves if they are too tight. When you exit the curve it resumes previous setting. If I enter the same curve at the same speed without cruise control, X5 does not interfere with what I'm doing.

2. I find it rather strange that with onboard navigation, X5 does not automatically set the time. I have to do it by hand and to hope that I will not have to adjust it too often. Navigation is based on timestamps to begin with, why not use it? Or, it could sync time with the cellular network that BMW Assist uses...

3. Search for POI in the navigation system is quite clunky. I really wish that I could search for POI without selecting a category it belongs to. For example, I had to try multiple categories to find a local zoo. It is not obvious, which category it belongs to. And every time I had to "re-type" the entry in the search bar. That is annoying.

I agree with #3. I don't like that I have to select a category first. And the fact that it's no simple task to type in a full name of an establishment while on the road, I don't want to drill-down that far, believing half the time it will come back with 0 results in that category. Let us do a fuzzy search on a specified distance away. I don't care if it takes a whole minute for results as long as it is found.

BTW, my March '08 DVD still has Rallye BMW located in Roslyn. It's funny I test drove their X5s back in December '07 at their new Westbury location and they've been there for many months before that. You can probably verify this under Information --> Cars & Travel --> BMW Centers (near NY). It took me a couple tries to even realize they had a category for BMW Centers to begin with. Name search in another category came back with no results (which relates to my previous point).

Anyway, outdated info can waste a lot of your time... and it's not like the DVD was too old for that particular information.