Sygic Mobile Maps

In-car GPS navigation

By Scott Bartley / Tuesday, December 01 2009

With the cellphone ban while driving enforced from November 1st, there’s no better time to think about how you can make yourself the safest possible driver. To us here at PC World there’s no safer option when driving than letting a GPS navigation device take the stress and distraction out of navigating your way round unfamiliar streets. With voice guidance and GPS pinpointing your exact location it means your eyes need never leave the road and your hands can remain firmly on the wheel. No more messing around with maps or trying to decipher instructions from the person sitting next to you. What’s more, if you own an iPhone, an Android phone or a Windows Mobile 6.5 phone with a built-in GPS receiver, you won’t even need to purchase a standalone device.

Sygic Mobile Maps is an application that installs on your phone (in our case we tested the iPhone version) and provides all the features you’d find on a traditional in-car GPS device. When it appeared in iTunes a few months back it was the first such application available with New Zealand maps and, not surprisingly, it quickly shot to the top of the popularity charts. At only $65 (that’s about half the price of the competing TomTom app) it’s a veritable bargain.

Mobile Maps offers detailed street maps for the whole of New Zealand, which are downloaded in their entirety to your phone at the time of purchase – meaning you’ll not need any expensive 3G internet access to see them when you’re driving those remote, phone service-free roads we love so much in this country.

Turn-by-turn navigation provides both visual and voice instructions to guide you on your way, while the animated mapping system keeps track of your location and alerts you to upcoming turns as you get near. We found the maps to be crisp, bright and easy to follow with an uncluttered and highly customisable interface. One trick we found particularly useful was the ability to pick and choose which four pieces of information (things like current speed, distance to go, ETA and so on) you want displayed in the info bar that runs across the bottom of the screen. Night mode automatically changes the display to muted colours so your entire cabin isn’t lit up by the iPhone’s display when it gets dark.

Included along with the maps is a detailed set of points of interest (POI), which includes thousands of listings for things such as petrol stations, restaurants, carparks, emergency services, cash machines and many others. Running low on fuel? At the touch of a button you can ask it to guide you to the nearest petrol station (or fast food joint).

At 393MB (for the iPhone version) it’s quite a large download but that’s because it also includes the maps for Australia. This is great if you cross the ditch frequently but a pain in that it defaults to Australia when you start the app. This isn’t such a big deal but it does mean that when entering an address to navigate to you first need to choose which country you’re searching in; Australia or New Zealand. A better option for Sygic would be if you could set the default to one or the other.

Entering addresses can be problematic if you don’t know the exact name of the suburb or region you should be searching in (even if you know the street name) since you must correctly specify the region you’re searching within before you can try your luck with the street address. For rural areas in particular it can take a couple of guesses to get it right.

The only other gripe we have is in regard to the keyboard, it’s Sygic’s own creation and works differently to the iPhone’s standard keyboard both in terms of convention and sensitivity.

None of these are show stoppers, however. In fact, from what we’ve seen so far Sygic seem quick to update and refine their product. A couple of updates already released have added new features and fixed some problems. Given the excellent navigation, fully-loaded set of features and low price, we’d not hesitate in recommending Sygic Mobile Maps to anyone with a compatible phone.

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