photo credit: Stuck in Customs
Lately, there have been a number of updated releases in the iPhone navigation software market. With all these recently updated releases, I decided to try some of these new versions out this past week as I made my way up and back between the Alabama Gulf Coast, and southern Michigan – about a 1000 mile (1600km) trip. This trip also gave me the opportunity to try the new live traffic features of Navigon (courtesy Navigon). We often talk about using these apps to get you around town, but now I had the perfect chance to see just how well these apps did on a very long road trip!
So to start with, I made sure that my “home” location was programmed into each of the pieces of software. This is where I got my first surprise – CoPilot Live was incapable of looking up the name of the street I lived on – even though it’s more than 20 years old! The others had no problem. Additionally, CoPilot shows my street on it’s map, so I was able to set it that way, but why would it not be available in an address search? As a matter of fact, NONE of the streets in my neighborhood come up in an address search! Weird flaw that I don’t remember being in their earlier version. When I reviewed this application in September I noted other flawed data, but I am happy to report that they fixed the anomalies I reported to them at that time.
Once that was done, I programmed the destination into the software. They all found it and took it just fine and created the router reasonably quickly, but I did notice an interesting aspect of this generation of navigation apps – none of them held the route forever. This isn’t to say you couldn’t save the route. What I mean is that when you quit each application and restart again (like when you pull into a rest stop, for example) – the apps generally remembers where you are and what the current route is - and you are able to simply begin travelling again. But what I learned here is that eventually, they all forget the current route.
Surprisingly, Navigon was the worst about forgetting what the current route was. If you were away from it for even a short time, you had to re-enter your destination. The program that was the best at remembering over time was iGo MyWay. But all of these programs eventually forgot the current route. Even though re-entering the destination is easy, you lose all your travel distance data and such. It simply wasn’t something I was expecting.
Sygic Mobile Maps
Now when you are making a really long trip like this one (17 hours each way), one of the things you find yourself loving or hating is the actual user interface of each navigation application. How pleasant is each main map display to read? Does it give you all the information you want? Are the road names and instructions easy to note in a glance? (more on audio information in a minute). Is it easy to trigger menus and sub-options?
Navigon
In terms of the usability and pleasantness of the display, I found that Navigon had the most attractive display – by a long shot. Yes – I understand that this a purely subjective call, but there was a clear difference when you are viewing these over the course of a long trip. The lane selection views when you came up on interchanges were amazingly well implemented.
iGo My Way
That said, Navigon was NOT, however,the one that provided the most useful information to me overall - iGo was much better about showing me the details I wanted to see about my travel, with Sygic a close second. CoPilot was best when it came to displaying current POI (point-of-interest) information, but it’s screen organization was a little more cluttered feeling and had almost a low-res feel to it. I found it more difficult to locate what I wanted quickly using CoPilot Live, but it had some of the most advanced customization options. By contrast, iGo had the pertinent information in the corners and on the top and bottom – leaving the main map display very clear – but it was a little weak on displaying road names and POIs and it’s lane selection information (and the one used by Sygic) wasn’t quite as nice as Navigon’s.
CoPilot Live
So, as expected, all these players have trade-offs! And even though iGo had the best combination of information on the screen (for what I wanted), I actually found myself wishing that iGo had stuck to the interface it used in it’s old version 6 or version 8 incarnations on the Windows Mobile platform – that display was well laid out (although their menu structure was a little clumsy).
Audio alerts are obviously a big thing for most people. When implemented correctly, it can add a big level of safety to the navigation process since you don’t need to look at the navigation screen excessively. There are some people feel that TTS (text-to-speech) is a must have as well. I do not. TTS is nice – sometimes – but I find that TTS implementations often mis-speak road names and I actually find that MORE confusing than if they never say the name of the road at all. It’s also clumsy when you have a number of maneuvers in quick succession – there often isn’t time to give the instruction AND the road name. I have found, therefore that I do better with instructions only – no TTS speaking of the road names. That said, Navigon supports TTS, as does CoPilot Live, but iGo MyWay and Sygic do not yet support TTS (but both promise it). Sygic, iGo, and CoPilot Live offer spoken instructions in a variety of languages which is very cool as well.
So as I’m travelling along I like to use the truck stops rather than the smaller gas stations – especially if I am travelling in the night and I don’t know the area that well. These are usually pretty well spaced along the interstates and they always seem to have reasonable quality fuels. I tend to prefer to use Pilot or Love’s stations. Interesting thing, though – NONE of these apps had Love’s stations in their POI lists. Most had the Pilot stations listed, but none listed the Love’s stations. I ended up actually reverting back to the built-in Google Maps app at one point to find a Love’s station!
iGo My Way
One disappointment I had was in the Navigon traffic service. As I mentioned, the people at Navigon were really nice in giving me their traffic service to use and I thought it would be really cool. But I was disappointed by two things: One – I thought I would see, in big cities at least, traffic flow indicated on the maps like you see in Google maps – red/yellow/green depending on speed and flow. That simply isn’t part of the program. The program simply downloads traffic warnings and reroutes automatically around critical ones if you want.
So the traffic messages were buried a few layers deep – not all that easy to access, and, in a couple of cases, the traffic notes were unhelpful or things that should have been there simply weren’t. In the Detroit area, my route carried me south of the city, yet all the traffic messages were about events to the north of the city – totally irrelevant to my travel route, yet they were included. In the Nashville area there was a stretch of long-term construction that slowed things down completely and an accident that had clearly been there a while, yet neither thing was mentioned in the traffic notes at all. So overall, I was somewhat disappointed in the service. Had the application displayed the flow information on the map, then the missing messages wouldn’t have been as critical – I would have seen the slowdowns from the flow info, but that isn’t the approach they took, so I was less that thrilled with the usefulness of the service.
At this point, I will mention that I actually had to make this trip twice in the course of a week. And before you ask – yeah – it was a BIG pain. I mention this because when I made the first trip I was using an iPhone 3G. By the second trip, however, I had purchased an iPhone 3GS. The difference is a faster processor and graphics support – more RAM, more storage space, and the compass. Did it matter? Well it did to iGo MyWay. On the first trip, iGo often didn’t like quitting and restarting over and over – it would sometimes stick on launch and have to be force-quit. That stopped happening once I had the 3GS. The short answer here is that GPS apps like a LOT of memory and processor speed – the more the better! The behavior of iGo made this abundantly clear. What’s interesting to me, however, is that there are many apps on Windows Mobile that used to do this is half of the RAM of an iPhone or iPhone 3G and a slower processor!
So one of the interesting things of note on an iPhone is that deep integration with the iPod application that exists throughout the device. Lately, all of the GPS vendors seem to be rushing to build iPod integration into their applications. Personally, it’s not something I generally want to do – use my device for music as well as GPS at the same time. Why? Too much fussing with volume levels and such for one thing – getting the GPS announcements loud enough without destroying my eardrums from a particularly loud song. It’s too much grief for the return I get, but it is something many other people like doing so I wanted to make sure I tried working with it in each application so I could report on it here!
iGo My Way
I had difficulty getting the controls in IGo MyWay to pick a whole playlist. I could pick a single song easily, but it seemed reluctant to pick a whole playlist. iGo and CoPilot put the controls for the iPod in their main menu (in CoPilot, you have to page over to see the option). Although those are functional, they are not terrible graceful. Sygic says they have the ability to control music built in, but I had difficulty finding those controls. I’m sure I am just missing something obvious, but I couldn’t find it’s iPod controls. Maybe that says something about how they are being presented. Unsurprisingly, Navigon had the nicest link I think – you could tell it to put a single icon in the lower right corner of the display. It was an easy way to pop up the iPod controls and it was unobtrusive to the main display.
One of the things I found irritating is that a few of the apps didn’t think that displaying the current time was important. Navigon and iGo leave your iPhone menu bar intact so you continue to see the time, battery, etc., but Sygic and CoPilot take over the whole display to maximize maps visibility. This is fine, but I really still wanted to be able to see the current time. Sygic lets you put it back in via one of their display panels, but this takes the place of some other piece of information. CoPilot doesn’t show you current time – not even as a swappable option. Again – I could have missed it but I didn’t see it as a menu choice anywhere!
Navigon
One of my other hats here at Gear Diary has been to write about my hobby of studying other languages and the neat technologies to help you. As such, I decided to take a look at the language capabilities of these programs and they were, for the most part fair to middling, but there was one standout – Sygic Mobile Maps. It makes all general announcements and menu displays in a whopping 20 languages (but not all ! CoPilot also let me change the language of the menus and voice too (and had a lot of choices), but half the menus options didn’t change in the language I chose (I tried others with better results) - really weird. Navigon doesn’t really give you many choices in it’s North American version – I haven’t checked it’s European edition though. The North American edition of iGo MyWay offers about a half dozen languages. UPDATE: Navigon DOES support multiple languages, but the support isn’t obvious. What they do is they automatically detect that language choices you’ve made in your iPhone and they change their menus/voices to match! Clever!
I’d like to see all of these vendors offer extended language support like they do for their European products – at least until we are able to see support for languages all over the world! That would help European travelers as well as many non-English speakers in the U.S. Sygic offers 20+ languages today – iGo only offers a handful, but their European product offers language support for 29 languages! I thought Navigon was the same – only supporting English in the North American product. Even their website isn’t clear on the subject of language support, but I only just ran into an article that said that Navigon pulled its language from the language the iPhone is set to. And guess what? It does! Very cool! The only real downside is that the application can’t be set to a language that is different than that of the iPhone itself. So come-on iGo – get with the program and give us full language support in the North American products!
CoPilot Live
If you are looking for more information on any of these apps, you can check out our previous reviews of Navigon (August 2009), iGo My Way (August 2009), CoPilot Live (September 2009), and Sygic Mobile Maps (August 2009).
So having put these titles through their paces, what ended up being my favorite? Tough call – they will all do the job and do it reasonably well. I really liked iGo MyWayoverall for the combination of information that appears on the screen. It was the most useful to my travels overall. Right behind it though was Navigon. I like the look/feel of Navigon better, but it didn’t display as much useful info on the screen as I wanted, but my recent discovery of it’s “hidden” language support raises it a bit in my mind. I was also pleased with Sygic Mobile Maps, but its still got a few oddities that they need to work on, but it’s language support was amazingly good! Last for me was CoPilot Live, which I know is the favorite of a lot of folks due to it’s low price. CoPilot Live really disappointed me when it didn’t have the streets of my neighborhood – which has been there for 20+ years. And for all of it’s POIs the lack of Love’s stations in it’s lists really surprised me. So although I like CoPilot Live, and I like what it’s trying to be (at an excellent price), I liked the others a little more.
Navigon
You might wonder, in all this, why I didn’t mention any of the offboard apps (navigation programs that load their maps over the Internet on the fly) like MapQuest Navigator or AT&T Navigator. The reason is simple – they require a full-time data connection to function and this not always possible over the course of very long trips. As such, I do not feel they are suitable for this kind of long-distance navigation.
During the course of my trip I ran into numerous spots in places like the Tennessee and Kentucky hills with very weak or no data coverage. Since offboard navigation apps don’t download a corridor of data (a technique I have argued in the past that they SHOULD use), they can leave you hung out to dry with no navigation information whatsoever, especially when you seem to be in a remote area. In an urban setting they can do a wonderful job for you, but for long distance navigation – not so much. In long distance navigation, I’ve found an onboard solution is MUCH more consistent reliable.
If and when these apps start offering a corridor download option I will absolutely want to take a look again to compare them on a feature basis to the onboard apps in the context of long distance routing and travelling. In many situations, the smaller footprint and current nature of the maps can make offboard navigation apps very appealing, despite the somewhat poorer performance (as maps are being downloaded). But again, I think they are not well suited to long distance navigation where your connection coverage may be less than ideal.
That said, if you’re a fan of offboard navigation solutions, you should check out our previous coverage of AT&T Navigator, and Mapquest Navigator. And make sure you take a look at our latest AT&T Navigator giveaway!
Sygic Mobile Maps
And lastly, let me mention that all of these applications are rapidly growing and changing. Their developers keep improving things and adding features. For example, Navigon just released an update (1.4) that features things like:
*better pedestrian navigation
*Google Local Search (that would have helped with my Love’s problem!)
*input using coordinates
*a new SOS/direct help feature
*manual zooming while navigating
*favorites on the map
*improved iPod handling (audiobook support)
*faster startup time
*improvements in the way you browse traffic messages
iGo also just released an update (1.1) that includes:
*navigation to contacts
*calling POIs
*iPod controls
*multi-point routing (waypoints)
* QWERTY keyboard
* updated maps
Sygic’s recent update includes:
*updated maps
* improved handling of music
* improved navigation to contacts
* simplified destination setting (no need to choose state)
And the folks at ALK (CoPilot) recently added:
*in app purchasing of premium services (live traffic, fuel price searching, local searching)
So keep watching our space for updated information as these things progress. The market is still young!
CoPilot Live (North America) is currently available on sale for $24.99, Navigon MobileNavigator North America is on sale for $59.99, Sygic Mobile Maps America is $59.99 (a U.S. only verison is only $39.99), and iGo MyWay for North America is $64.99. All titles are currently available at the AppStore!
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