Paul Cooper

Initial Thoughts

Well firstly I would like to make it clear that I have not used any other satellite navigation applications for the iPhone, and this review is being made solely on my experience with two standalone units (TomTom GO 730 & Garmin Nüvi 1240).

I have been waiting anxiously for a satnav unit for the iPhone for sometime, and when Navigon released MobileNavigator a few months back I knew it wouldn’t be long for TomTom to release theirs. However, I was wrong and considering TomTom were able to demonstrate their application at Apple’s WWDC 09 it took a considerable amount of time after for them to release it.

Some people call me crazy, but I have bought a tonne of applications for my iPhone… From games to utilities, the most expensive being £6.99. The thing is, that’s all well and good spending under £10 but ~£60 is alot of money to spend on a piece of software that has no guaranteed support and is basically impossible to get a refund on. That’s why when looking to buy the Navigon, Sygic or CoPilot I wanted to make sure I had made the right choice and wouldn’t have to buy another bit of software.

After looking at countless reviews I was torn between the Navigon and the Sygic app, both have their differences… I was leaning towards Navigon because after looking at the Sygic’s UI I was not so sure.

Anyway, enough of that… Here is a quick breakdown of the noticeable differences between the 4 bits of software, for the UK/European Versions…

	TomTom	Navigon MobileNavigator	Sygic	CoPilot Live
Custom POI’s	No	Yes	Yes	No
Speed Cameras	Yes	Yes	Yes	Not Currently
Address Book Integration	Yes	Yes	No	Yes
Motorway Guidance	No	Yes	No	Kind Of
Coverage	UK & Ireland	Europe	Europe	UK
Price	£59.99	£59.99	£54.99	£25.99

Well in the end I went for the TomTom app, mainly because it was by a company I know but also because it was cheaper than I thought and the initial reviews and video I saw I took a liking to it.

It took just under 10 mins to download the app, and on my iPhone 3G S about 2-3 seconds to open. It was very fast!

The startup menu is simple and intuitive, within a few seconds I had a route setup to take me to my nearest petrol garage. GPS lock came quickly, even though I was indoors! To begin with I tried a route demo just to get an idea of how the app worked. I was suprised just how loud the speaker was, the audio has obviously been recorded in very high quality and the voices sounded crisp, I did notice a tiny bit of distortion however at full volume.

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TBC