August 16, 2009

Part I

About ten years ago, the men in my life started showing up with various gps devices. I laughed. I scoffed. After all, who needed to know your latitude and longitude, or track where the fish were biting! And then one day, I discovered voiced enabled navigation, apologized to all for my scoffing, and jumped on the gps bandwagon.

If you look in my junk drawer, you’ll find at least three gps pucks. Fortunately, I haven’t needed them with my last two phones, but they were essential when I first started getting unlost. I paid a small fortune for a huge gps puck to use with my Treo 650, and another tidy sum for TomTom. I liked TomTom at first. It was a pain to determine which maps to load. I live in an area that map makers insist on dividing into regions, so despite the fact that 800 people here in Mobile commute over to Pascagoula MS every day to work at the shipyard…the map of MS has to be loaded separately in 3 out of 4 navigation programs.

Then I discovered Telenav when I moved to Sprint and the Treo 700p. Telenav never let me down, and I always got a good chuckle hearing the street names of the gulf coast mangled by the robotic voice. While doing product reviews, I also got to try out Garmin. Of these three, Telenav definitely had the most up to date maps, but curiously enough they all wanted to take me home in a round about way that avoided a left turn in my quiet residential neighborhood.

I was able to resist putting Telenav on my iPhone, and have managed to find my way around just using Google maps. Unfortunately, this will leave you up the proverbial creek with no paddle if you find yourself in a no coverage area, and I did spend a few panic-stricken moments this summer thinking I would spend the rest of my life in South Carolina. So I jumped at the opportunity when I was offered a promo code for Sygic Mobile Maps.

I started the download into iTunes at 5:45 a.m., and it was still downloading at 6:15 when I left for school. It is a whopping 1.62GB, so prepare accordingly both timewise, and spacewise. It didn’t take nearly as long to sync onto my iPhone.

Loading Mobile Maps, you get the usual warning about not operating it while driving. I always hope that warning really means "set your route before you put your vehicle in drive."

The interface is attractive and intuitive. The only thing unattractive about this whole experience is the tiny black virtual keyboard for user input. I’m unsure why they didn’t use the nice keyboard the iPhone already has. The app keyboard seems small and cramped, and even with small fingers I found it very difficult to use.

Speaking of user input, the only real disappointment with Mobile Maps is that you have to enter addresses (using that bizarre black keyboard). The good news is, contact lookup is coming in the next version. You may also have noticed in the screenshot showing the keyboard, that instead of iPhone style scrolling, you have to use scroll arrows when choosing from a list. This is not only counterintuitive, but also on the way out, to be replaced by the more familiar iPhone style scroll in the next version.

Rather than attempt to address the features in any kind of order, I’m going to begin with the feature that was most important to me. Mobile Maps not only allows you to preview your route, but it will allow you to find alternate routes if the first one shown was not to your liking, for whatever reason.

Just for fun, I calculated the route between home and school. I’ve been traveling the same route for 15 years, but I know it’s not the fastest or shortest – merely what’s easy and what I’ve gotten used to. I asked Mobile Maps for several alternative routes, and this is what it gave me:

I’ve lined these up according to the time it would take me to get from home to school. As you can see, the first route (the one actually taken by most people I know!) is less than 13 minutes. The second, which is very close to my daily route, clocks in at just over 13 minutes. I was astounded that Mobile Maps came up with five more alternate routes, with the final option taking close to a half hour.

Given the amount of construction going on in any city at any time of year, having the option of multiple routes can be a blessing. You can also specify certain roads to take or avoid on your route.

Each of the routes you see in these screenshots was done with the "Fastest" option chosen. You can also request Economic, Shortest, Pedestrian, and Bicycle.

Once you have decided on your preferred route, you can not only view the map, but you can see the turn by turn directions in list view. You also get one of the options I liked best from TomTom, which is the ability to play out the trip virtually on your iPhone. You can watch the arrows move, hear the voice prompts, and become thoroughly familiar with your route before you ever get in the car. (Something drivers should do even when relying heavily on gps navigation!)

Another great feature here is that you don’t have to have the gps up and running to plot a route. I have done several fantasy trips from the comfort of my living room, where the gps is forever "searching for a signal." This, of course, means that you can enter the information for your trip safely before you even get into your car, and then head out the door. By the time your seatbelt is fastened, Mobile Maps will have a lock on the gps, and you’re ready to roll. This is exactly how I timed it, by the way. I set the course before walking out the door, walked the 5 steps to my car, and prepared to pull out. The gps was locked and the course was loaded by the time I started the engine. (I don’t know why you would need it faster than that!)

Voice prompts are clear and easy to understand. They also come in a variety of languages and dialects. I enjoyed having the Englishman direct me to school this morning, even if I didn’t always follow his directions. As soon as you miss a turn, or turn before you should have, you will be prompted to make an immediate u-turn. I can recall getting frustrated a few years ago when I was using TeleNav to leave New Orleans during Mardi Gras. It repeatedly instructed me to make a u-turn, but that would have cut into a parade route.Mobile Maps makes the request once, and then reroutes, without any fuss or bother. I was very impressed with the speed with which it did the reroute.

For the purpose of this review, I laid my iPhone on the dash, and just listened to the directions to see when they would come in relation to turns. A warning was given 200 yards ahead of the turn, and the final "turn left," or "turn right" came in plenty of time to make the turn. Bear in mind that this was city driving at moderate speeds.

Perhaps because they use maps from Tele Atlas and WhereIs rather than Navteq, my route home is direct, and doesn’t insist on taking me around the block. Or perhaps this just means the maps weren’t written by a former UPS employee. Either way, it suggests the maps are up to date, and logical. However, in the next part of this review, I plan on heading off to my favorite Thai restaurant, which happens to be located just off a brand new interstate exit ramp. So that will give me the opportunity to see just how up to date the maps are, as well as test out a few things that go along with highway driving. Sygic’s website claims you can play music in the background and the voice prompts will interrupt, so I will let you know exactly how that works. I will also see just what happens when a phone call interrupts a route.

Stay tuned for part 2, coming towards the end of the week!

And if you truly can’t resist, you can find Sygic Mobile Maps in the iTunes store for all of North America for $79.99.

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