TomTom UK & Ireland for iPhone Review

Let me start this review by explaining why satellite navigation is so important to me. It is a technology that has benefited my life more than many others which are designed to make tasks a little easier and to bring more fun to our down time. Prior to satellite navigation every long journey required lots of map studying, guesswork as to how long each journey would take and the added dangers of continually referring to a map on the passenger seat. And I shouldn’t forget the inconvenience of traffic jams which were a regular occurrence on my journeys; I live 10 minutes from the M25.

It all came to a head one day when my wife and I decided to take our children to a local farm for the day a few years back. It was the middle of Summer and baking hot, but the drive would not be a problem because it was only a 20 minute journey. Because of this I decided not to take my TomTom. Big mistake. We hit some traffic as we turned onto the M25 from the M23 and just sat there. One whole hour later we had moved about fifty feet and as you can imagine I was starting to fear the worst. Considering we only needed to be on the M25 for 1 junction this was getting more than a bit silly.

After about 2 hours nature was calling and I was in a bit of a situation. In desperation I drank the last of the water from the only bottle we had handy and used it as an impromptu (uncomfortable) toilet. At this exact moment the lady in the car in front decided to get out of her vehicle and wander over to us. She leaned down by the window, I pushed the button to open it slightly and exclaimed “For God’s sake. Can’t a man go to the toilet in the privacy of his own car?!?” She walked to the vehicle behind us. It was getting tense in the car by now and the children were bored, irritable and generally annoying to be near. My wife was bored, irritable and generally annoyed to be near me and so we carried on waiting. Incredibly the lady returned to our car, looking very excited, and I wound down the window again. She said “Do you know what’s happened?” Dramatic pause. “There’s been an accident. That’s why we are stuck here!” She beamed at imparting this knowledge onto us. “No sh*t Sherlock! Not for one minute did I think we had been stuck here for 2 hours because of an accident. And there was me thinking it was because of the light rain shower we had this morning. Of course there’s been an accident you stupid woman!” She walked back to her car.

Now, I was feeling quite bad at this point; I needed the toilet again, I was hot and bothered, the kids were crying, I had upset a stranger and my wife was blaming me for deciding to go to the farm in the first place. To cut a long story short we eventually started moving (slowly) after 3.5 hours at which point some people started to use the hard shoulder to make their getaway. Two police cars moved to the hard shoulder to stop them, but then the traffic on the inside lane left a gap, and so we drove as fast as we could through the gap to get to the next junction. I didn’t care that the police were there; after 4 hours I would have sold my house to be free from that awful motorway, the awful baking temperature and the Sunday that should have been a pleasant day out.

If only I had taken my TomTom and used the traffic service. Such a simple thing to do, but I didn’t and our day was ruined. For a year afterwards my son was petrified of getting stuck in long traffic jams, and so was I.

You don’t need to have suffered a traumatic traffic event to need decent navigation and traffic management though because these do offer some advantages you may not have thought about previously. They save time, fuel and hassle and can also make any journey a lot safer. I am a big advocate of satellite navigation and always want the best. The question is, has TomTom managed to create the best iPhone navigation experience on the market?

The list of features included is long indeed and so I will not cover everyone of them, but if you want to know what you get for your money take a look at this page. OK, I will stop talking about myself. It’s time to look at the app itself.

Pricing

Let’s get the pricing out of the way first. At the time of writing TomTom UK & Ireland costs £42.99 on the iTunes app store and the HD Traffic option will set you back £22.99 for a year’s subscription.

Co-Pilot Live UK & Ireland retails for £19.99 plus a further £19.99 for a year’s traffic. NAVIGON MobileNavigator British Isles varies in price, but seems to settle at around £40 plus £14.99 for a year’s traffic, £1.19 to use postcode searching (you what?) and £6.99 for 3D Panorama View. Navmii GPS UK & Ireland costs £19.99 with no traffic option currently available. NDrive was retailing for a crazy price on the App Store until Apple used the infamous kill switch and removed it from people’s devices. I remember asking myself how NDrive could be sold at such a low price when the cost of licensing maps is considered? I guess I now have my answer…

Reference links-

Co-Pilot Live review

Navmii GPS UK & Ireland review

Looking at the above prices the TomTom offering looks expensive and the actual difference comes in at an average of £20 extra if the traffic options are taken. It is an obvious disadvantage in a market that has more consumer users than when GPS software was popular on Windows Mobile, Palm OS and Symbian. Users of older smartphones would pay for the best solution, but the iPhone market is different. Anything over £0.59 can cause complaints and TomTom is taking a different path to the rest at this time which takes some balls. However, this approach mimics the path Apple is making; better quality components will result in a higher price and TomTom’s job is to convince potential consumers that it is offering a better solution. Ultimately I have to judge if TomTom for the iPhone is worthy of the higher price tag when the others offer similar features, at least in the spec sheets.

Setting Up

Installing TomTom is not a process worthy of many words; you buy it from the App Store and it installs. How dull is that? Seriously, this is where the iPhone eco system shines and it’s all over in a matter of minutes. I was surprised at how quickly the app loaded up when I first tapped it; many navigation apps take an age to load, but TomTom is quite swift in this area and it popped up in approximately 4 seconds. The initial screen is a simple map and you may wander what you need to do next. One tap on the map brings up a listed menu which is fairly long; Navigate to, Route options, Mute sound, Day Colours, 2D Map, TomTom Traffic, Advanced planning, Browse map, Help me, Manage favourites, Call POI, TomTom News and Change settings. Many of these options have sub-menus as well which is an indication of just how much is included. If you go to the last option, Change settings, you can delve even deeper, but a tap on Advanced here brings up some hidden settings. They are on/off radio buttons to disable IQ Routes, Traffic, GPS Enhancer and Lane Images- my tip is to leave them all set to ‘on’ because they make a big difference to the overall routing experience.

Some of the menu options are ordered in a strange way which is a little hard to fathom at first. For example, with the ‘Navigate to’ option searching by Postcode is 8th in the list which is bizarre to me. I would say that postcode searching is very popular and should be near the top, but the options here are as complete as you will find elsewhere in the software. You can find destinations in almost any possible way; by contact, POI, coordinates, points on a map, Google local search and the list goes on and on. It is impressively complete and so far has proved very reliable for me. The one area of concern are the points of interest which are on the whole accurate, but at other times way out. I remember searching for a Pizza place in Co-Pilot while sat 100 feet away from my local Pizza Hut- it came up with the nearest one being 16 miles away. On TomTom I tried a search by POI (can’t remember what for, but there was one locally) and I was offered a POI in Paris, France! POIs are historically a bit hit and miss on all navigation systems so I am not overly concerned about this particularly because the Google Local Search works so well.

I won’t go further into the menu options because it would start to get boring, but I will say that the options are incredibly complete and, on the whole, logically set out once you are used to the occasional quirk. One option I liked was the ability to share a route- simply tap the menu options and a detailed list and map will be emailed to the contact of your choice. Within this email is a link to open the route in TomTom- clever stuff and potentially very useful.

The First Trip

Once I had input my destination I was ready to test TomTom out properly. It was a 100 mile trip from Crawley to Bournemouth on a Friday evening which is notorious for traffic issues and so I expected problems. I decided to follow the route exactly as TomTom wanted me to and was surprised by the results.

On more than one occasion we ended up on different roads to ones we have used before in the many, many times we have driven to Bournemouth and it seemed as though the IQ Routes system was working well. It took some time for me to adjust to the way roundabouts and turnings are displayed on the screen; at first it appears as though you have a long way to travel before a turning, but the screen will show a short distance. This is at odds with every other system I have used, including standalone TomTom units, but after a couple of trips the benefits became clear- it offers an incredibly accurate view of where you are and when you need to turn which is especially useful in busy areas.

An alert popped up on the HD Traffic bar advising that there was a 2 minute delay 69 miles ahead. 2 minutes? There was no way on Earth it could be that precise, but sadly I did not get the chance to test it on my first trip because the delay had disappeared by the time we got there. As it happens the trip was traffic free and all in all I was very impressed with the way TomTom managed alerts, safety cameras and directions. Alerts were offered which included place and street names and this simple addition makes a big difference when you are travelling through a town for the first time. The selection of voices are also very natural and at no point did I have trouble understanding what was being said. All in all my first experience of using TomTom on the iPhone offered a glimpse of what to expect, and I was now expecting great things.

HD Traffic

The HD Traffic claims to be the best in the business and so I plumped down a further £23 to test it out. After some time with Co-Pilot I have started to lose confidence in the system because of a few recent times when it alerted me to traffic which moved away hours before and another time when I got stuck for over an hour with no warning at all.

The day after my first trip I had a chance to test it and the results were remarkable. During a short journey we were alerted to a 5 minute delay in 0.70 miles. This was a surprise to me because every other traffic system I have used has ignored towns and only managed to monitor motorways and A roads. Anyway, we reached the point of delay and there it was- a stream of traffic in front of us. As we moved along the delay dropped consistently down to 3 minutes and then eventually to 1 minute. We sat in the traffic and I said to my children, jokingly, that the traffic would be gone in 10 seconds. The traffic disappeared after 12 seconds (bad TomTom- 2 seconds out) and we were on our way again. This was a little bit weird to me because this level of traffic management is science fictions to anyone who has used other systems, but it has happened time after time since in my testing. It is not always as accurate as the above example, but the most it has been wrong so far was by 1.5 minutes during a particularly troublesome M25 trip.

TomTom HD Traffic has, so far, performed way ahead of my expectations and is as accurate as is possible with such a free flowing problem as traffic. I already have the utmost confidence in it and it is easily worth the extra £23. A remarkable service.

On The Road Again

In the past two weeks I have undertaken multiple trips using TomTom on an iPhone 4 and to date have not suffered any issues at all. The traffic service is exceptional and the routing has been spot on. Bristol is a town that causes much confusion on many navigation systems, but this version of TomTom handled it with ease. It’s useful in any review to find problems, but I admit to struggling here.

One feature that worked particularly well is the music integration. Using it with an FM Radio tuner, I found the onscreen controls easy to use and the blend of instructions and music to work well albeit with some disturbance on some channels. It is difficult to judge exactly how well a solution like this works because I was using a low quality FM transmitter, but the experience was interesting and from a software point of view, the TomTom music integration worked very well.

Conclusion

I expected this review to be much longer, but I hit a roadblock (excuse the pun) when it came to describing performance. The features are all in place and the traffic system is brilliant so that only leaves performance to take up the bulk of the words. The problem I found was that I never lost signal once, turnings had no delays and all audible instructions were clear and timed perfectly. Every part of every route was accurate and it felt like coming home to an old friend.

From my very first experience of GPS I used TomTom for many years and only recently moved to Co-Pilot because I was offered a review copy which stunned me with its quality. As time wore on, however, I noticed a few small glitches and so decided to try TomTom once again.

No product is perfect, that is impossible. However, when I compare this app to the other navigation solutions available for the iPhone platform and even to standalone GPS systems I struggle to see where it could improve. It is a remarkably complete piece of software that has been designed with the user in mind every step of the way. I wouldn’t change anything about it…

Available from iTunes for £42.99.