The TomTom turn by turn navigation application (Opens iTunes) from TomTom International was released to much anticipation on Monday, August 17th. It retails for $99 USD and this price was met with mixed emotions. Personally I expected something like this price point and eagerly handed iTunes my credit card info in exchange for a rather large download (apx 1.2 GB). It took about 45 minutes to download and install on my iPhone.
Now my personal experience with GPS’s has been limited to the Garmin StreetPilot 2820. This external, dash mount GPS receiver has bluetooth and XM radio capabilities and I’ve been using it for about 2 and a half years now. I honestly have no issues with this device. My only gripe as with most GPS receivers is the yearly map updates that have to be purchased.
Okay, so how does it work? Well… like any other GPS unit really. Upon launch you are greeted with a main menu. From here you can choose a destination, change routing options, mute the sound, change from day/night mode (why isn’t this triggered by sunset like other GPS units?), switch to 2d maps, perform advanced planning, browse the map, manage favorites, call the current POI (point of interest), there is an option called TomTom car kit – but it doesn’t do anything, and the last choice on the main menu is change settings.
The goal of this review is to give you an overall review of the application in action, so I will not detail each menu, just the most common ones used in day to day operations (well at least day to day for me.)
Route Planning:
The first thing you’ll want to do is choose a destination to route to. To do this, tap on “Navigate To…” on the main menu, from here you’ll get a menu to choose Home (this is set under “change settings” in the main menu), favorites, address, recent destinations, point of interest, point on map, and lastly, to a contact from your address book (rather handy!)
For the last two day’s I’ve been on the road, diving to various customer sites and hotels. So on Monday evening I left Iowa City and headed to Fremont, Nebraska. I had someone at work make reservations for me at the Holiday-Inn Express in Fremont but didn’t have the street address handy. I realize I could have used google maps to look this up, but that would kind of defeat the purpose.
So I launched the TomTom app, chose navigate to, and chose point of interest. From here you are presented with a poi list.
I chose POI in city and it came up with a search box for me to type and select the city. This is filtered by state, so you need to make sure you are in the correct state before hand. At first this tripped me up a bit because the button isn’t very obvious.
A few other notes here. When you select the state, the menu is actually labeled as “Select country” also when you type in cities like Des Moines it gives me several options like Des Moines(Batavia), Des Moines (Cantril). To find the correct city in this case I actually had to get the zip code of my destination. Not sure what the guys at TomTom are thinking here, this is confusing and the comparable GPS units I’ve used do not do this.
Okay – so back to finding my route to the Holiday-Inn Express in Fremont, NE. So I chose the state (country in the app) of Nebraska and tapped in Fremont, NE – then it took me to another menu that allowed me to search, choose hotel/motel, gas station, and a few other categories, you can set what categories you want to display here by tapping the “more” choice at the bottom of the menu. I chose Hotel/Motel and it listed all the Hotel/Motels near the city of my choice. From here I scrolled until I found Holiday Inn Express and tapped it.
I clicked done, and it calculated and created the route. Another gripe here, I couldn’t find a way for the app to give me the specific address of the POI. It would give me the street that it was on, and the option to call the POI, but not the specific address, other units do this, why can’t TomTom?
After the route was calculated I headed on my way.
Navigation:
As I headed out I was playing podcasts in the background and had the TomTom app running – this seems a perfectly viable way to work, the only thing here is you have to quit the TomTom app to make any iPod settings. I don’t fault TomTom for this. The ability to multitask on the iPhone has always been crippled by Apple. On the Garmin unit I have they have a nice button right on the map that takes me to the music player, I wish TomTom could have something like this.
The voice prompts are good, they are a little different than the Garmin and I made a few errors when driving, once I got off at the exit before I was supposed to, the second time I used the incorrect freeway interchange. I don’t blame TomTom for this, really every GPS unit has it’s own way of giving directions and nuances, it takes a bit to adjust to a different way is all.
The one request I have for TomTom here is somehow integrate a store in the app so I can download different voice packs. I really want Homer Simpson! The app ships the standard male and female voices with various languages. The one I used, Lori, was clear and quite understandable.
While using the unit I had it mounted to the windshield using a third party adapter. I initially used the application in landscape mode, but a few gripes here. Every other app I used wanted to remain in portrait mode, so I was stuck reading and interacting with the phone sideways while mounted since my mount does not swivel like the upcoming TomTom car kit. I ended up using the phone in the portrait mode just to make things easier on myself.
While using the app, you can receive phone calls, but this will quit the app. After you answer the call however, you can go back to the main menu via the home button and then relaunch the app. Also while listening to podcasts, the app will pause the audio of the podcast/music while giving the directions, then resume the music/podcast when complete. I rather like this, but I’ve heard others would prefer it to just “dim” the music/podcast volume like the mail notifications do.
Also while driving with the unit I found a neat feature – the speed is displayed in the lower left corner. If TomTom knows the speed limit of the road you are on, it will display your speed compared to the speed limit – for example 63/65. If you exceed the speed limit by more than 5MPH then the speed limit display turns red. I thought this was rather handy when driving through areas that were unfamiliar and the speed limit signs were no where to be found.
Conclusion:
TomTom is not new to the GPS game, they’ve been around for a while and know how its done. As a 1.0 iPhone app, I have to say I am impressed. I did find a few glitches with it, such as states being labeled as countries, but overall the app is ready for prime time.
The TomTom application for iPhone is a solid replacement for a dedicated GPS unit, and I foresee the next versions of the application to only get better, like an in app voice store please?!
