I originally posted this mini-review on another forum I frequent. Thought I'd share my initial impressions here, too:
Yesterday I bought the new "iGo My Way" GPS app for my (jailbroken) 3G. It's currently selling for $79 on the app store. I had been using the AT&T Navigator app, and I like it pretty well, but $10 a month adds up. Since my wife has an iPhone, too, and mentioned that she would like a GPS nav app on her phone, that would mean $20 a month. I figured a $79 flat fee (including free quarterly map updates until the end of 2010) was worth it since we can have the app on both of our phones. I had tried the Navigon Lite demo, but didn't really care for it. I had also used XGPS (the free jailbroken GPS nav app) for a while. I'm tired of waiting for TomTom, especially with the recent circulating price rumors.
So far, my feelings about iGo are mixed. It has an impressive feature-set. I very much like its "learning" system (it will rank your prior destinations by your current location, the time of day, and other factors - it basically tries to guess where you are likely to tell it you want to go, based upon what you have told it in the past, in an effort to help you do things in as few clicks as possible). Data entry is accomplished using a big-key keyboard, not the standard iphone keyboard, and impossible letters are eliminated from the keyboard as you type to help minimize typos. Everything is laid out intelligently and it is easy to use. It has automatic day/night settings. It calculates different routes for you (fast, economical, short, etc) and shows you each choice on a map, telling you how far, how long, etc, each one is. It has a lot of nice little bells and whistles. (And yes - you really can change your icon to a tank. Or any one of about 20 other different things - taxi, motorcycle, sports car, man, woman, ambulance, etc).
Yet I'm having problems. Most of the problems, I blame on the phone itself - the iPhone's GPS just isn't that great. Even when the app is showing full signal strength, the position marker lags behind current location. This is not bad enough to be a showstopper, but it does get annoying especially when making turns from a stopped position. It can take a while for the screen to jump ahead and show you your present location. This is something that happens for me with AT&T Navigator, too, but is something that I didn't see happen so much with Navigon - Navigon seemed smoother in that regard. However, more than just the GPS positioning seems laggy and slow to me. Press a button, and it can take a moment for the press to register. It just doesn't feel as 'snappy' as I'm sure it would on a 3GS.
There are currently three US voices to choose between (one female and two male), and they are serviceable but not fantastic. They are called "natural voices" but still sound digitized. The female one sounds the best. When driving to work this morning, the spoken directions were very laggy ("Turn...... left............ in100......feet.") The cadence was just off. It was like getting driving directions from the lovechild of William Shatner and Kirk Douglas. My 9 year old daughter said "It's a good thing we're not relying on this for our directions." At one point we deviated from our path and the app immediately tried to get us back on course. However, (and the timing of this may just be coincidental) from that point onward I got no further spoken directions - even after being back on course. I tried quitting out of the app and restarting it, but by the time it restarted and was up and running again (my course had been saved and it brought me back to it), I was already at my destination. Right now, there is no text-to-speech, which means that you don't get to hear "Turn left on Main Street," just "Turn left now" That's coming in an update. The audio guidance screencap posted above, that shows TTS choices, is not anywhere in the app I can see. TTS is not yet an option. The screenshot that they used for the PDF manual must have been taken from the update they are working on.
This app features two different 3D modes - one is the typical tilted perspective 3D mode, and the second is that plus 3D buildings that look like SimCity structures. Or at least that's how they look in screenshots and demos of the app. I didn't see a single 3D building during my 30 minute drive to work. Granted, I didn't drive past any famous structures.
The app took a LONG time to start up on my phone. And that's when it started - sometimes the app quits back to the springboard when trying to start. (And, yes, I did a full reboot of the phone after installing it). It doesn't label all streets (like Navigon), but rather attaches little tags to certain random streets (like AT&T Navigator). It doesn't provide traffic updates or give any information about gas prices or anything like that (Navigator does). It doesn't have a way to pre-enter trip information from your PC (Navigator does).
It's possible that some of my difficulty with the app may be related to my being jailbroken. Maybe background processes/things like SBSettings are interfering. I'll be able to test that out by using the app on my wife's stock 3G. But my phone isn't generally crashy or slow. It's jailbroken but other apps run stably and well.
I didn't have a chance to test playing background music yet. I'd kind of like to get things running well first.
I think that if the iPhone had just a bit more processing power, RAM, and a better GPS, this would be the GPS app to get. As things stand, I feel a bit like I'm trying to play Crysis on an old PC. Who's to blame - the game designer, for making a game that pushes the system to (or beyond) its limits? The PC, for having limits? Or the user, for not yet upgrading his PC? I suspect that when I get a 3GS, I'll be liking iGo much more than I do. At least for the moment, I have a bit of buyer remorse. But I'm not giving up on it yet - I'm going to keep trying it and maybe some of the initial quirkiness will work its way out.
FTW! That's a pretty neat idea