App Review: NDrive New Zealand….. another turn-by-turn app

Another turn-by-turn, but how does it compare

When you think you are done with all the turn-by-turn apps, along comes another. We received a number of tip offs yesterday letting us know that NDrive New Zealand had hit the AppStore. But at a cost of $84.99 how does it fair, is it a Sygic/TomTom/Co-Pilot beater??

Looks familiar (Sygic anyone??)

Well, unfortunately no it’s not. As Steve said, “until one allows me to use KITT for a voice then they’re all much alike” and this is true for the most part with the exception that this app is missing some other key features that should have been there from day one. It is late to the app store (compared with the others) and should therefore have the full feature set. It takes roughly two weeks for an app to be approved so they knew certain features were already available in the current alternatives.

The app itself is pretty much the same as we have seen before, after all it’s just another turn-by-turn app. So really we look to features. What does this have over the competitors. The answer…… nothing. Infact I would suggest you put your money towards any of the others (Sygic being my favourite) and I’ll explain why.

Seems cluttered for some reason

The main view of the map seems quite cluttered, with the large blue directional arrow on the left and the GPS signal on the right, yes some of this information can be switched off and it’s no major biggie but it just seems cluttered. Generally speaking though this is the same as all the others with all the relevant information you need/want.

One big thing this doesn’t have is speed limits. You can set the speed limit notification and speed camera warnings to alert you, however they are not dynamic like the other apps. Instead you set the speed limit at which you would like the notification to go off at i.e 50kmph, 60kmph etc etc. No matter what the speed limit of the road is, if you go over the limit you set you get alerted and boy do you get alerted, with a very loud  (american style) police siren, almost to the extent that it makes you jump causing you to crash and considering these are called “Safety Options” I think perhaps they should be toned down slightly.

Talking of volume, let’s look at the volume of the voice. You have a few options for voice (none of which are text-to-speech, but I’ll come to that), seven in total and only one per language. No major issue there but I would like to have seen more voices such as male English, US, Aussie, Irish or even Kiwi.

One voice per language

There are two major issues with the voice. #1 Text-to-speech. ANY GPS app that comes out from now on should have TTS as standard from day one. Apparently there is an update coming that will add this, but it should have been there from day one. #2 Volume. The volume of the voice is so quiet that even when plugged into my stereo I have to turn it right up to hear it clearly. This causes an issue as I don’t really want to be deafened by the sound of my music. There are options to turn the volume up or down (levels 0-5) but it really needs to be tweaked so that 5 is too loud and you can turn it down.

The actual voice directions themselves have a couple of quirks. The main one for me is that if you are getting a direction to “turn right and then turn left” this is essentially the two directions that have been bought together. If you are playing music whilst a direction comes on, it mutes it (not fade or pause) and on a number of occasions this leads to a very brief crackle or even sound of the music between the directions. This is very annoying as your music gets fragmented by the voice and the voice gets fragmented by a crackle or music.

Not a bad main UI

The main menu isn’t too bad with large images and swipe gestures between some screens. But again, unfortunately they have undone their good work in this area with some shocking UI’s elsewhere. Firstly the keyboard used throughout the app: why could they have not used the iPhone keyboard from the SDK. Why why why. Instead they have opted for their own keyboard which by default is in alphabetical order and not qwerty (although it can be switched on. Who does that?!)

Why Why Why?

Then there is the settings menu. With small and to be fair sometimes completely unresponsive buttons to press the settings menu is just a nightmare.  Think of pressing a button on a Windows mobile resistive screen and that’s what it feels like.

Nightmare

One thing I hate is when there are options that just don’t plain work. Especially here in New Zealand and especially ones that just should.

Ooh Search by postcode

Search by postcode is one of those things. It should work here, but it doesn’t. There really is no reason why it shouldn’t, but alas pressing that button returns you with this:

Grrrrr!

The auto day/night switching seems to be out for me as well. I have to have it switched off because otherwise it shows the night view during the day.

Night view, during the day

There is a complete lack of audio controls in this version of the app, but apparently they are coming in an update. Again, this is something that should have been there from the get go.

Now you may see this as quite a scathing review and for the most part it is. You may have read elsewhere that “for the money it’s not bad”, but that for me is the issue. Over here the app costs $84.99, the same as Sygic and CoPilot but it isn’t in the same league as those. It’s playing the same game but not in the same league. And the price. In the U.S it’s $32.99 and Sygic, TomTom etc etc are twice as much, so why should we have to pay the same for an app with less rounded features and poorer build quality.

There are some features I just couldn’t work out, such as “My Account” which doesn’t seem to do anything, and apparently there is a mode called “Adventure navigation” which I couldn’t find.

What year is it?

To round off, the GPS lock wasn’t bad and it was pretty quick to get a fix (even if the detail screen is rather old and odd looking). It was slightly behind where I was on the road but only by a few metres and it was a very cloudy and rainy day. This seems to be par for the course with these apps and I am more convinced that’s an iPhone issue and not an app issue.

Personally I would spend my money elsewhere. According to NDrive there is an update coming that will resolve a number of the issues I have listed above, in which case it wouldn’t be too bad. But I think this stuff should have been sorted before it was released.

If you want to buy it the link is below. If you have already done so, let us know what you reckon in the comments.

– NDrive New Zealand