So as most of you know – I like to have an up-to-date satellite navigation system. I run a chinese no-name GPS unit (with dual processor, wince5, word, acrobat, mp4 player etc and built in tv tuner). I also have it on my HTC touch diamond 2 phone. The software I prefer is igo (Igo My Way 8 by nav’n’go). It does the usual tricks with points of interests (POIs), built-in speed cams, speedlimits. lane info, text-to-speech (TTS) etc etc. The most annoying thing compared to garmin etc is the TTS does not haev an australian TTS voice, but the software is the most advanced and customiseable. Recently the maps have sucked and it has been very hard to get an up date. I was running the telstra 2008 maps then a december 2008 navteq map. There has been a constant battle between the two companies: sensis- whereis (Telstra) and Navteq (Nokia). Whereis was the gold standard for years and navteq sucked. Then navteq made a comeback in early 2008 with brilliant maps. Not quite as good for inner cities etc but great for rural/ parks and the like. Anyway there was a long delay with getting a new map update but now the R17 whereis (jan 2010) map is out and I have started using whereis again. I have to say I am impressed. So far the maps are accurate (in melbourne), lots more POI information, lane info, speed limits, traffic signs, school zones (that only show up during school hours). The maps aren’t perfect and a few speedlimits are wrong already but most of the new highway info is alrady built-in. I am sure navteq is still better for in the outback but I think whereis might finally be making a comeback (companies like navman and mio swapped from whereis to navteq as whereis was too slow in updating). I will wait till I get my hands on the new navteq maps though to make a true comparison. At least I won’t haev to change software just to get a new map now (yay) as I was starting to play with Navigon mobile navigator just so I could have a 2009 map working.
2 comments:
Having recently used PND's with current maps from both NAVTEQ and WhereIs, I have no doubt that NAVTEQ is far better than WhereIs for navigation in Australia!
For example, on WhereIs, when I do a simple POI lookup, their maps give me half a dozen 'junk' entries that are all basically the same POI, some are wrong or misspelled... what the heck's with that?!?! It's like WhereIs don't bother checking their data and just keep adding new mistakes on top of old ones. In contrast, NAVTEQ seem to have their POI's correctly named and their data cleaned up and sorted pretty well so it just works much better.
I've also been playing with this new iPhone app called Mocal which is just amazing for POI lookup and many other features such as 'click to call' and 'click to route' straight to the store I want to go to. This Mocal app integrates True Local directories and uses NAVTEQ maps, and I found their deep city street navigation and POI information is just unbelievably good! The price is also very competitive!
You have a 2010 map for navteq? I hadn't seen one listed. The 2010 whereis map has only been out a couple of weeks so I haven't played much with the POI's but in quickly searching through ones around hawthorn and richmond the junk ones had been removed. Wouldn't suprise me if there is still lots of crap though - not like sensis runs the white/yellow pages or anything :)
Igo has built in click to call, click to route etc for POI's which is why I like it. my other half has an iphone which i need to get software for though - and I do like the true local directories. That's the only reason I would consider running navman smart-st on a PND. I will have to check out this software though, thanks.
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