It’s the most recognisable of the satellite navigation brands on the market, but can Tom Tom make the move from in-car sat nav to smartphone app? We find out!
I do a lot of long distance driving and rely heavily on sat navs. I have a terrible sense of direction! Up until recently I was using a Mio, however that has given up the ghost and I’ve been forced to use my iphone as a navigation tool. I always saw using my iphone in that fashion as a real inconvenience as it would drain battery and I never considered apps to be as good as a real navigation system. Tom Tom proved me wrong!
The Tom Tom app is incredibly advanced and feature full. As well as showing you the way to where you’d like to go, it also shows you where various points of interest and gives you a variety of ways to find your destination.
One of my favourite features of the app is the speed camera warnings. They’re not too abrupt, but alert you enough to take heed of the alert. The app is very straight forward to use and is visually informative when inputting the details.
You get a choice of voices and even a level of voices. There’s the basic voices which reads aloud clear directions. The advances voice gives you more information such as turn by turn notifications, names/ numbers of roads and other various text to speech instructions. There’s also the novelty choice of getting a celebrity voice. I haven’t tried this yet, however, I’m off to see if I can find a Brian Blessed voice to amuse me when I drive.
Overall, a great app and a real eye opener to a cynic like myself. I’m now converted and couldn’t live without this iphone app on standby. You can get it from the App Store priced at a reasonable £39.99. The Tom Tom app is also available on the iPad as well.