iPhone sat-nav apps tested: On your bike

TomTom dominates the sat-nav market and was the golden child at the launch of the iPhone 3GS, but it's taken longer than most to get its app into iTunes. That may be because it was holding out for its hardware dock, which contains an extra GPS receiver. We can see why it wanted to wait, because TomTom shows off how weak the iPhone's GPS receiver is. It often had trouble getting a fix and keeping up to date as we moved.

We found TomTom slow to load, but we liked its large, clear menus. There are plenty of options for planning a route, from typing the postcode to just tapping the map, and you also get the IQ routes feature. This uses data about how long it took other drivers to take a certain trip, rather than depending on the length and speed limit of roads, so your route might change depending on the time of day. The data is gathered by knowing about most other TomToms and Vodafone phones, so although it's probably evil we're happy to use its suggestions.

TomTom takes advantage of the iPhone's multi-touch support in a few places, such as when you're browsing the map. But once your route has been planned, you can't touch the screen to scroll around the map or zoom in and out. Instead, touching the screen opened the menu, which may be normal in sat-nav world, but it's utterly unintuitive if you come from the land of iPhone apps. On the other hand, we liked that TomTom used the iPhone's standard on-screen keyboard.

We found TomTom was particularly bad at audible directions, and it sometimes interrupted our music for only half of the direction it was speaking, so we'd hear 'in 50 metres, turn...' and then we were left hanging for the most important part.

Considering TomTom is the most expensive of the sat-nav apps we tested by far, we expected it would blow the others out of the water. While some of the advanced features are good, and we liked that it used the iPhone's keyboard, without its hardware dock it's just not very good at being a sat-nav.

Download here from iTunes

Pedal-power rating

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Update: The TomTom car kit hardware dock is now available from the Apple store or from TomTom. It's £100, which doesn't include the TomTom app. Ouch!