Heavy duty car navigation comes to the iPhone
Map: TomTom
TomTom, one of the leading manufacturers of stand-alone GPS systems, rolled out its industrial strength iPhone car navigation software across the time zones Sunday, starting in New Zealand and ending with an app for the U.S. and Canadian markets early Monday.
The price, $99.99 for the app and its maps (a car mount adaptor kit is sold separately), is high for an iPhone application and puts it well above competing software-only products such as Sygic Mobile Maps ($39.99), CoPilot Live ($34.99) or the free built-in Google Map app.
But for travelers who depend on such things, it's a better deal than AT&T's (T) Navigator, a subscription service in which the app is free but the service adds $10 to your monthly cell phone bill for as long as you use it. (See The App Store takes a bad turn.)
TomTom's app stirred some interest in the tech press after Apple (AAPL) selected it to be one of the featured demos at its World Wide Developers Conference in June. In addition to TomTom's proprietary maps and the TeleAtlas, which it acquired in 2008 for $4.8 billion in a bidding war with rival Garmin (GRMN), it offers several features custom made for the iPhone OS. These include, according to its promo material:
- Tap and go: Tap the multi-touch screen to choose your starting point and destination. Scroll through the menu, or pinch to zoom in and out on a map.
- Meet up with friend: Find an entry in your iPhone contacts list, and the TomTom app will find the way there.
- Find a place to eat: Choose a restaurant, call to reserve your table, then follow the directions.
- The smartest routes: TomTom IQ Routes systen claims to calculate the smartest, most efficient route based on the collective experience of millions of drivers.
Photo: TomTom
The optional car mount, whose price has not yet been published, also charges your iPhone, provides an amplified speaker for turn-by-turn instructions, lets you dial hands-free, flips to offer both horizontal and landscape orientations and adds an antenna to boost GPS reception.
Earlier versions of the TomTom app were available on some Palm (PALM) models and Pocket PCs. On the iPhone, it weighs in at a hefty 1.21 GB; you may have to clear out some songs to make room for all those maps.
Below: A video demo with Scotch tape and an Australian accent by recombu.com's Andrew Lim.
After reading the article that does not mention the MobileNavigator app by Navigon I am left feeling that Tom Tom is the poorer of the applications. The iTunes description makes the Navigon product seem much better. Where can we get a comparison?
Spending another $150 bucks on a TomTom mount is crazy. Check out the Soaripod. It'll work in the car AND you can take it with you to the office, plane, etc. Its portable, universal, and alot less $.
For offline iPod Touch and iPhone users (for instance travelling overseas), consider OffMaps (no relation to me, except I bought it yesterday), which uses OpenStreetMaps, and lets you download street maps from anywhere in the world for FREE. There is a limit per download of 150Mb. I got this yesterday, and downloaded some maps for my city – Melbourne. To get the city down to 1km, takes about 50mb, but does not provide all street names. I copied the city centre down to 200m, and the outer suburbs down to 500m. All up about 220Mb. Full city map to 200m is in the Gbs.
While OpenStreetMaps is not available everywhere, their data is growing. See the video of growth in 2008 (and you can contribute data with your iPhone – must write that App to make this easy) : http://www.vimeo.com/2598878. This video rocks. Thanks to itoworld.com.
Functions of OffMaps include turn by turn directions, but they need improving. About 6/10, compared to Tom Tom 10/10.
In Australia, Offmaps costs $4.
All the reporting talks about the periodic charge for the AT&T service but doesn't mention TomTom's insistence that you pay for each quarter's map updates no matter how often you update your maps. After a year or more of not updating, getting updated maps is so expensive as to be crazy. Why won't TomTom let you get an annual update if that's all you feel you need instead of charging you for all the quarterly updates you didn't want/need?
No body can beat TomTom for ease of use of and navigation. They are simply the Godzilla in a modern day jungel.
Well, it did not take long. Sometime in June I posted that four out of five "articles" on the "Technology" panel of the main CNNMoney page were about Apple (or iPhone), with the words "Apple" or "iPhone" in the headline. The same day, it all disappeared (I posted then that may be it was a six-sigma black-swan event), but not for long.
Apple promoters in CNN succumbed to the good cause that is AAPL and, after a few days of two, then three, finally, again, four out of five headlines in the "Technology" panel of CNNMoney promote Apple (go Apple, go!)
I did a little research on this. I can buy the latest and greatest Portable Garmin 275T from Amazon for $199. This comes preloaded with Europe and North American maps, has bluetooth for hands free cell phone use, and FM traffic updates. After my Europe trip I can sell it used on Ebay for maybe $150 if I decide not to keep it for USA use
TomTom's overpriced alternative is $99 for the USA maps for my iPhone plus $139 for the Eurpope maps for my iPhone plus a data roaming upcharge for Europe to AT&T (because the TomTom software does increase iPhone data usage).
Even though I love my iPhone, TomTom's ulta-dumb pricing is causing me to place my order for the Garmin today with Amazon.
Hey, I signed up for TomTom's iPhone e-mail list! When are they planning on letting civilian iPhone users know?
The Sprint Simply Everything Plan includes turn by turn directions and live search (for destinations) on my Samsung Instinct.
while google maps is great with unlimited 3g data, but it's not much of a help when i drive cross country where there's no cell reception and i can't receive map data.
i really wish Garmin would release a SD card version of their Garmin Mobile series of GPS.
Just got back from 2 weeks in Denmark. I added the $59 data plan to my iPhone before we left, to subsidize the cost of data roaming. In Denmark, the maps worked flawlessly (sometimes a little slow to load when we were on the non-3G network <20% of the time), but we put over 2,000 km on the car during our trip and never got lost. My August AT&T bill didn't have any data overage from our use.
What I don't need: An expensive GPS application for iPhone in the USA where I live. Google maps is more than adequate for finding my way. Don't need turn by turn navigation. Unlimited 3G data makes Google Maps an excellent choice without the $99 TomTom maps.
What I do need: Downloadable maps like TomTom for our upcoming two week France vacation. Roaming charges would be excessive for Google maps. We always manage to get lost when driving in Europe. This iPhone App would be really great to have for a Europe trip but not at the $139 price tag they've put on it for Western Europe. That's too expensive for two weeks usage.
TomTom on the iPhone is a joke, over priced and in no way works as advertised.