TomTom Mobile Navigation for iPhone 1.3
The latest update of TomTom's iPhone app brings it more or less up to par with its standalone PND units. The app now features HD Traffic, IQ Routes and Advanced Lane Guidance, though the first of those is an extra-cost subscription. You also get text-to-voice for road names and numbers but like all TomTom kit it reads them as hundreds and thousands which I find hugely annoying. Still, the Tele Atlas maps are hard to beat for clarity, accuracy and reliability.
TomTom will also sell you an all singing, all dancing screen mount which boosts GPS reception and has a built-in speaker. Handy, but at £100, expensive too. The app itself, at £43 for UK and Ireland mappage, is more expensive than Navigon's comparable offering, and more than twice the price of ALK's CoPilot. Of course, TomTom hasn't got to where it is today by selling tat and for drivers who have a need to dodge the gridlock, HD Traffic and IQ Routes are both worth having and usefully can be purchased within the app for £1.19 a day, £5 a month, or £23 a year.
Reg Rating 85%
Price £30-60, depending on region covered
Platforms iPhone
More Info TomTom
ALK CoPilot Live 8
I have to confess to a having a fondness for CoPolit for the simple reason I've been running it as my day-to-day satnav on an HTC Hero for nearly a year and it has never once steered me wrong. It's quick to fire up and very easy to use, with a simple, finger friendly and twit-proof menu system. It's also one of the few systems that doesn't ask an annoying "are you sure?" when you exit the programme.
Navigation is free of unnecessary frills. Text-to-speech, for instance, is only available for Windows Mobile as a £3.95 extra. Live traffic information is an extra-cost option, but the thing CoPilot does have in its favour is price: at either £19 or £27 a pop for maps of the UK and Ireland depending on platform and with all the live services such as traffic data only costing £20 a year, it's a tough act to beat.
For my money, it also has the most pleasant voice guides - the instructions themselves are excellent, while the calming female tone gets the majority of place name pronunciations correct. ALK has also been quick out of the blocks with a version specifically for the iPad, though how you mount that on your dash is any one's guess.
Reg Rating 90%
Price £20 iPhone, £27 Android and Windows Mobile
Platforms iPhone, iPad, Android, Windows Mobile
More Info ALK
Group Test: smartphone satnav apps
COMMENTS
T-Mobile UK PAYG
"Android users on contract tariffs with bundled data, but will raise issues if you are on PAYG or roaming abroad. "
T-Mobile UK PAYG does a really good data deal. I pay 20 quid for a 6 month booster which gives me 1GB of allowance each month. That equates to £3.33/month. You don't get charged if you exceed that limit, but they will warn you about it. You're not going to hit 1GB a month unless you're downloading videos every day or doing a lot of tethering. Perfect for navigation+web browsing+email though.
I'm not associated with T-Mobile other than as a customer.
I would hardly call that a review!
Altough based on the same dataset, its a completely separate application and approach (offline, vs online) than Skobbler....
Can I ask a silly question?
Why are Satnavs always Landscape? I use my Nexus in Portrait, as Im more interested in what is coming up than what is going on to the side of my route.
What am I missing?
Googlemaps route planning
You can use GoogleMaps on the web to plan your route in detail - dragging the little markers to add waypoints or avoid particular roads, then save it to 'My Maps', open it in GoogleMaps on the phone and then navigate it.
On device map data
Maybe I missed it, but a summary of which apps have the map data stored on the device and which ones download over your data connection would be handy. Otherwise a very useful review.
