Over to Julie (Wills):
I'm renowned amongst those who know me for having no sense of direction at all. You know the line about being at the back of the queue when sense of direction was being handed out? I couldn't even find the queue! So I've always been a bit partial to any sort of routing software. Way back in the dark ages, I bought a copy of Autoroute for the PC and printed out directions whenever I went anywhere I wasn't sure about. Then, when my Psion 5mx died and I bought a Windows Mobile PDA, I bought TomTom for it (before TomTom started producing hardware solutions, and even before Bluetooth was common on either PDAs or GPS receivers – my setup was a positive triumph of wires.)
In more recent years, I've been using a standalone TomTom One, so that my partner and I can both use it without being deprived of a personal PDA/smartphone while the other uses it for navigation. It's not perfect by a long way: navigating from A to C via B is less than intuitive, the options you need in real life don't exist for avoiding accidents and roadworks, and it's a bit inclined to take some dubious "shortcuts" from time-to-time, but on the whole, it works, and it gets you where you're going. And, of course, there are LOTS of POIs (Points Of Interest) available to download from the internet.
TomTom is available for S60 3rd edition, but is only officially supported on phones with the miniSD cards that it's supplied on – which means no current models. Oh, and it doesn't work with the internal GPS. Despite that, it worked just fine on my E90 with a Bluetooth GPS (I just copied the supplied miniSD to a microSD before installation), but given the lack of internal GPS support and apparent lack of interest on TomTom's part to support any of the newer devices, the review seemed a good opportunity from a personal point of view to evaluate an alternative.
Anyway, back to the point. When I said I'd do a comparative review, I naïvely thought I'd be comparing features and ease of use of the user interface, possibly how "good" the routes were, ... that sort of thing. Sadly, this couldn't be further from the truth. In the three review copies of software I've tried (and I won't name names), I've had:
- Spoken instructions way too late to be useful (and in one laughably memorable case – luckily within a mile of home on a route that even I know – one instruction that was offered at least 300 yards AFTER we'd already negotiated the junction. So late that for a while we were trying to work out which junction ahead it was referring to.) It was like having a back seat navigator who kept falling asleep.
- Displays that make very poor use of the small amount of available screen real estate, use of poor choices of fonts/symbols/colours, and which have little in the way of customisation. Clearly the designers never actually tried their options on a phone mounted in a car when driving. In contrast, TomTom uses a dark blue background with very clear bold white text, which resizes according to what information you choose to display - and no wasted background space. A small amount of information is thus displayed in a nice big font. You can choose any combination of the available pieces of information. The more you add, the smaller it gets, so you can find the combination that suits you best. By contrast, in one of the solutions I had for review, the text is small, lightweight and has a LOT of space around it. To get the information that I find most useful (e.g. ETA, and distance to destination), you have to cover almost half of the screen with an information bar, and even then, it's barely readable. Other packages give you only a limited number of pre-set options – generally not offering the combinations that I find most useful, of course. One of the packages never quite seemed to get the map zoom right for the current situation.
- Software that either hangs or crashes my otherwise stable E90. Recovering from that is NOT something you want to do whilst driving!
- Frankly ridiculous routes. On one trip, my destination was a County Showground. On this occasion, for various reasons, my partner was travelling separately, and he had the TomTom (which I usually use for comparison/backup,) so I was completely relying on the Sat Nav software I had installed at the time. The written instructions from the show organisers were very simple and basically went "Motorway, A-road, short bit of B-road to show ground, arrive", so I wasn't expecting any difficulties. I should have followed them! Having left the motorway, I was instructed to turn left off the A-road. After 6 successive instructions from the Sat Nav software to turn left (or was it 7? - I lost count), you can imagine I was rather starting to lose faith! It got me there in the end, but as I was driving a campervan at the time, I really would have appreciated a more direct route! That's one route I wish I'd been tracking with Sports Tracker – I'd have loved to have looked up what convoluted route it came up with. I've since discovered that that particular software does seem to have a rather strong preference for left turns... even when turning right would be an eminently more sensible route.
- Settings and voice instructions based on distance rather than time (or the software's own intelligence). Two miles ahead may be a good distance to know about a junction you need on a motorway or fast dual carriageway, but it's simply confusing to be told to take the second exit at the next roundabout when you still have a village to reach and drive though, with a set of traffic lights to wait at in the next mile. That does nothing more than distract you from your driving, to wonder what roundabout it's talking about. Equally, although it was good at combining instructions, e.g. "turn right, then first left" in housing estates, it didn't do the same at motorway exits because the distance was too great, even though the "following turn" information is even more important on a motorway exit, so that you can get in the correct lane.
- Map data which subjectively seems to have something like 50% of UK postcodes simply missing. And I don't mean postcodes on new housing estates either. I'm talking about postcodes for well-established addresses, including one house which is Georgian (it belongs to a family member, and the postcode hasn't changed at least since they moved there many years ago). My 50% failure rate is entirely subjective. I haven't counted the number of postcodes it's found and the number it hasn't, but it's certainly bad enough for me to have no faith whatsoever in being able to locate a large percentage of my destinations, much less get good directions to get there.
All of this is on commercial software that could hardly be classified as cheap, and in most cases, not available as a trial version.
I was really hoping to find something that would prove to be a worthy replacement for (or at least alternative to) TomTom, but when the basics don't work, all the features in the world won't help. I'm afraid I'm still looking.
Julie Wills
From me: I have to echo Julie's findings. Package after package that I've tried in the last 2 years has been a let down and usually unreviewable - in that I'd have to tear it to shreds, usually because of terrible instability or hopeless map/postcode data. In addition, some Sat Nav software (I'm kind of looking at CoPilot Live here) seems to be in perpetual beta and when you ask why the version sent in for review doesn't work, the excuse is given that your device isn't actually supported and that the software's in 'beta' anyway.
I know for a fact that Julie has had to jump through hoops to contact each company, too, badgering them for latest, working versions and in essence wasting time she'd rather have spent driving, testing and generally getting on with life.
Is it too much to ask to have a single mapping/nav package that runs on all S60 devices, supports internal GPS, produces sensible routes and doesn't keep crashing?
Nokia Maps is still my pick, to be honest, even if it can't tick the 'sensible routes' box every time. At least it's essentially free until you actually need it, has a 'good enough' interface, works on everything and doesn't crash. Which is better than most, it seems.
Steve Litchfield, All About Symbian, 16 October 2008