TomTom for iPhone

In-car navigation

By Scott Bartley / Tuesday, October 27 2009

Kiwi drivers will, by now, be familiar with the name TomTom when it comes to in-car GPS navigation. The company makes some of the hottest devices you’d ever want to stick to your windscreen. Of course, any hardware device is only as good as its software, so when we heard TomTom was going to release an application for iPhone, we got rather excited. We have, after all, consistently rated TomTom’s devices highly when it comes to usability and features. The thought of being able to tack that kind of functionality onto an iPhone was a mouth-watering prospect indeed.
We fired up the Kiwi iTunes store and were pleasantly surprised to see the New Zealand maps would soak up only 86MB of space on our iPhone, that’s a significantly smaller hit than, say, the North American maps which clock in at well over a gigabyte.

After installation we found the iPhone app works every bit as well as its hardware-based siblings. The interface is snappy, smooth and neatly organised, while actual navigation (be it in 3D mode or 2D mode) is as good as a “proper” TomTom. In fact, because the iPhone’s touchscreen is the best around, operating the app turns out to be nicer than operating TomTom’s own hardware.

However, we did notice the GPS signal was not as strong as a dedicated in-car GPS device, something we put down to the iPhone’s weak satellite receiver. GPS on the iPhone often turns in a less than perfect showing no matter which app it happens to be running with at the time, so this wasn’t entirely unexpected.

With this in mind it’s important to mount the iPhone in such a position that it can see as much of the sky through the window as possible. This will maximise reception and cut down on lost signal warnings.

This underwhelming GPS performance from the iPhone is quite possibly the reason TomTom is releasing its own bracket and charging kit (you’ll need a charger because between the GPS and the screen, the battery will be flat in under two hours) later in the year. We’ve heard it sports a signal booster which should improve GPS performance, although, with overseas reports of pricing at over US$200 it may actually be more cost-effective to purchase a cheap dedicated sat nav for the car.

As it stands, $120 for the application alone is hardly an impulse buy, but you do get a lot for you money. That 86MB download includes detailed street maps covering the entire country (maps are provided by AA subsidiary Geosmart), a comprehensive Points Of Interest (POI) database, turn-by-turn audio navigation instructions, advanced route planning and even TomTom’s latest trick, IQ Routes.

If you’re wondering whether the basic navigation built into Google Maps on the iPhone would do just as good a job, the answer is no. Part of the beauty of the TomTom application is in the way all the maps are stored locally. This means that, unlike Google Maps, you don’t need to be in range of the 3G network (or any form of mobile coverage for that matter) to view the maps. All you need is a charged battery and a line of sight to the sky above.

Since the iPhone is also, well, a phone, it’s possible to look up a restaurant in the POI list, call to make a reservation, then navigate your way there in just a couple of clicks.

Sadly, when incoming phone calls are received you can’t view the map as the call takes priority and, as we all know, the iPhone is a poor multi-tasker. After you hang up the call TomTom fires back up and carries on automatically but we’d hoped to be able to take a call yet still have the TomTom application running in the foreground.

All-in-all, if you’ve got an iPhone 3G or 3GS the TomTom app adds some significant functionality to your device. As an in-car GPS it works very well indeed and is only let down by the iPhone’s relatively weak GPS performance and lack of multi-tasking prowess. Even so, it’s a polished application that we plan on getting a lot of use from, as should you.

More Software reviews