Hot Applications Satellite Navigation for Your iPhone

* CoPilot Live UK & Ireland  £19.99/$32.99

Frankly, we’re impressed. At half the price of bigger names, you’d be forgiven for thinking that it had fewer features. In fact, this was one of our favorites. The basic route-finding functionality worked great, though it did try to take us up a road that was closed to cars at the time. We liked how, at the end of a journey, it asked us if we wanted to add another destination, and that it ducked background audio during spoken instructions. The user interface is gaudy, but well engineered to save on-screen clutter.

* Navigation for Western Europe – iGO My Way 2009 £39.99/$69.99

This app was a real disappointment, even though its provision of maps Western Europe makes it seem like good value. It’s not just that the interface is clumsy; it also fails in some pretty basic tasks. You can’t enter postcodes, for example, making entering of destinations unwieldy. Although it was tested in the same circumstances as the others, it sometimes lost its satellite lock. Instructions were often confusing, and we had to take the iPhone out of our car kit to relaunch the app.

* Navigon MobileNavigator British Isles £34.99/$59.99

The first GPS app to launch remains one of the best. The spoken and visual instructions are clear and helpful, and it gently ducks background music so voice prompts are clearly heard. A textto- speech engine effectively reads out road names. Annoyingly, though, postcode search is an extra £1.19 via in-app purchase, so you can’t rely on inputting postcodes to get you to your destinations. Despite this, however, it made the best decisions about how to route us through Bath during our challenge.

* Mobile Maps UK & Ireland £29.99/$49.99

The strong, graphic interface of this app from Sygic is more than just cosmetic: it’s easy to follow the clear on-screen map. It’s just a shame that the text in the menu systems – and indeed even in the information bar at the bottom of the screen – is on the small side, making its legibility poor. Happily, it does full postcode searching and contacts look-up, though it can struggle to parse non-standard addresses. It made one bad decision in our routing challenge, but it also picked a good route that no other app found.

* TomTom UK & Ireland £42.99/$74.99

By far the most polished of the apps here, but also the most expensive, TomTom’s system feels like the app Apple itself would make. Menus are clear and data is easy to enter with copy and paste, while the crisp, reserved on-screen graphics are a joy. But although it’s capable of some brilliant insights about which route to take – thanks to its IQ Routes technology, we assume, which knows at what time of the day certain roads are busy – it did make a couple of bad mistakes in our route challenge.

* TomTom Western Europe £79.99 
Quality GPS navigation on your iPhone

01 As well as this portrait view, you can use TomTom in landscape orientation
02 IQ Routes knows where and when congestion hits – and it routes accordingly
03 Although there’s no traffic information, you can manually avoid roadblocks
04 To stop the iPhone’s screen dazzling you at night, the screen’s brightness adjusts

While it took some time to welcome turn-by-turn sat nav devices to the list of gadgets the iPhone can transform into, thanks to term changes to the iPhone SDK there are now plenty of navigational apps to choose from… the TomTom brand probably has the biggest cachet right now though. The app itself is superb. It’s polished, very easy to use and features TomTom’s smart IQ Routes system, which changes its route recommendation at different times of the day, since it knows when particular roads get busy. Other facilities include being able to email a route to a contact, an emergency menu, Google powered search for local businesses, and fuel efficient routes. Sure, there are things we’d like to see added – exploitation of the iPhone’s always-on data connection for fuel prices, for starters – but it’s the slickest, most complete solution we’ve used. It’s better than the cheaper Navigon offering, which is hampered by not enabling full postcode look-ups. There’s no doubt that it’s expensive, though, especially compared to, say, CoPilot Live. The dedicated car kit costs a further £99.95 and, while the handset itself is well made and offers a decent speaker, GPS chipset and hands-free facility, when you’re talking about £180, you’re talking about a lot of money to spend on an app and an ‘accessory’.

UK price: £79.99  | US price: $74.99  | Web: www.tomtom.com

Download size: 1.85GB  |  iPod touch compatible: Yes  | Requires: iOS 3.0 or later

* Sygic Mobile Maps UK & Ireland £29.99
It’s cheaper than TomTom’s, but is it good?

Sygic’s Mobile Maps UK & Ireland satellite navigation app for the iPhone has a very distinctive look – almost cartoon-like, almost like you’re looking at someone’s mock-up of what a sat nav system could look like. You may or may not like the style of screen, but it does mean that some of the interface elements are rather small, and they can be tricky to read when driving. There are plenty of features – it can do a full postcode search, and the view zooms in and out as your speed changes as you need to see less or more detail.

You can quickly search for addresses for contacts in your iPhone, get advice on which lane you should be in, and you can even get updates on how the weather might affect your journey. The app doesn’t, however, duck playing music to let spoken instructions be clearly heard, so that’s down to manual control, and you’re dependent on finding a good, powered cradle for your car.
UK price: £29.99  |  US price: $49.99  |  Web: www.sygic.co.uk
Download size: 297MB  |  iPod touch compatible: Yes  |  Requires: iOS 4.0 or later

* Navigon Mobile Navigator Europe £69.99  
Navigator with some nice features.

Navigon might not be as recognisable a brand as Garmin or TomTom but it has a good pedigree. It contains maps for the whole of Europe – a UK-only version is available for £53 – so is a hefty 1.83GB.
The overall feel is, while there’s room for improvement, Navigon has put a lot of effort into getting things right; the iPhone display toggles happily from portrait to landscape, you can easily find addresses for anyone on your contacts list, and there’s the handy Points of Interest facility. So, the problems. Some are not the fault of the app itself; you’ll need a cradle like Griffin’s WindowSeat, and the iPhone’s speaker is a little distortionprone at sufficient volumes for the spoken directions. GPS plus the always-on screen eats battery life so you’ll need a power adaptor. Then there are the app niggles; you can start music playing before launching the app, but it won’t duck to let the spoken instructions stand out, and street names aren’t displayed in the 3D view. More seriously, you can’t do full UK postcode look-ups, and there’s no support for traffic updates, something that could easily be added (presumably for a cost) through the iPhone’s data connection.
UK price: £69.99  |  US price: $119.99  |  Web: www.navigon.com
Download size: 1.83GB  |  iPod touch compatible: Yes  |  Requires: iOS 3.0 or later

Posted by Radians at Friday, June 03, 2011