Sygic Turn-by-turn Navigation on the iPhone 3G


I tested out the GPS app Sygic today and found it to be more than I had assumed it would be. I took it for a test while driving 30km to work.













Features tested :

  • Start to finish routing
  • Alternate on the fly routing
  • Storing current GPS positions in History & Favorites
  • Setting Home location
  • Time taken to aquire a GPS signal
  • Both English Voices (US&UK)
  • Audio through car charger's FM Transmitter
  • Delay in updating the car's position
  • Tried out both 3D & 2D views
  • Day and Night colour schemes
  • Lane indications
  • Battery consumption


I threw a few spanners in the works and made some detours to see how fast it could recalculate the route automatically. Impressive to say the least. It managed to get me back on track quite quickly. I tested out the manual alternate route feature and since I travel to work 5 days a week I know which routes are good and possible. It covered them perfectly. I found that this app is really only good when moving at speeds of more than 20km.


I tried walking from my car to work which is about a 10 minute walk and found that the direction of the pointer was off by 45 degrees at times. It did this despite me nearly walking 6-8kms most of the way. It's updates while walking weren't as nice as when I was driving but I guess you could always use Google Maps for that.

I've used TomTom on my old Windows Mobile in the past and find this to be a huge jump into the future in regards to screen realestate, crips anti-aliased screets (Vector based?) and speed at which it calculates routes.

As for the battery, I started on 50% and ended up at about 25% and that's with no car charger use, handheld nearly all of the journey.

Things that need work :
  • Back and Navigation buttons need a bit of work. Swiping motions and double taps would solve this and make it FAR easier to fiddle with if driving.
  • Volume for the guidance was not incredibly loud but you could blame that on the iPhone's tiny built in speaker. Using my Belkin FM transmitter solved that issue as I had it coming out of the stereo loud and clear.
  • Volume was hard to adjust, it could only be adjusted when the guidance voice was speaking.
Conclusion
I can definitely see myself using this as a dedicated GPS device for all major trips. Coupled with an iPhone FM Transmitter/car charger the two make a good combo. There was only one minor bug I noticed but it's so insignificant it's not worth complaining about.

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