Review of the TomTom App for the iPhone

PLANNING A ROUTE AND USING THE APP

Planning a route is fairly straight forward. You can enter the name of the town, then the name of the street, then the house number of where you want to go – or the postcode, although you will have to scroll down the list of options to ge the postcode option (which I missed the first time).

The route calculation is very quick – quicker than some dedicated satnavs I have seen and used.

I am also very impressed with the speed in which it found and locked on to the satellites. As I mentioned earlier, my Navagon satnav can often take up to 20 minutes to do this, the TomTom app on my iPhone took a few seconds – and that is from the same start location as well.

To do a fair test I set them both up with a route and started the clock – the TomTom found the satellites, sorted my route and gave me my directions in under a minute, the Navigon took 16 minutes.

You get great visuals on your journey as well.

TOMTOM HD TRAFFIC

This is a service I hadn’t really used previously on other devices.

Here is how TomTom describe the HD Traffic service:

Get the most up-to-date, real-time traffic information for your route live on your TomTom app. Includes detailed incident reports, estimated delay times and alternative route proposals

This is an in-app purchase, meaning the you have to buy the service from within the app itself, but it still uses your iTunes account.

You can then choose which to buy (a day, a month or a year).

You have to have an account with TomTom as well, but you can easily set that up on the iPhone itself.

You then sign in….

Select your choice….

And then confirm the purchase.

Using it was a breeze. You get constant updates – the lovely voice tells you that your journey time is delayed by X minutes and you can also see information on the display about the delay.

So as you can see below there was a 3 minute delay at that particular point (33.4 miles from my present location). The information is very useful and was surprisingly accurate.

The only criticism I have is that you have to use a slider on the right hand side to scroll through the various delays on your route to find what you are looking for, and that isn’t very easy whilst driving and so I don’t recommend you try!

The traffic information is constantly being updated – as you can see below.

You can then press the Minimise delays button to have TomTom sort you out with a different route.

This additional service is a must have for anyone who does a lot of driving – I was surprised how much time it actually saved me in just a few weeks of travelling.