Sygic Mobile Maps revisited

Warp speed! Turn left at Death Star!

As reported earlier, a major update of Sygic Mobile Maps 2009 [iTunes Link] has gone live through the App Store today. Weighing in at around 350MB, it’s a fairly hefty download which introduces a good amount of new features and a number of improvements and fixes. One of them – text-to-speech – is an exciting and major introduction which could give it quite an edge over the competition. But how does it stack up in real-life use?

The text-to-speech function actually works very well. Instead of just generic “turn left” and “turn right” announcements, Mobile Maps now reads out explicit instructions including the street name, thus eliminating any confusion as to which street you are being directed to. There are four English-language voices to choose from that support text-to-speech – an American male and female, and a British male and female. All four voices are very clear and sound a bit more polished than the original voices (which are still available should you prefer them).

Pappanwee!

Pronounciation of English / Western names is very good on the whole, with streets like Hereford Street, Gloucester Street, Queen Street all sounding very natural and almost recorded. Unfortunately, though, it does struggle with Maori names. Papanui Road becomes “Pa-pan-wee Road” and Wairakei Road becomes “Way-ra-kay Road”, for example. Unfortunately I think it would be hoping for just a little too much to expect these to be perfected and I’m sure it struggles just as hard with some Welsh and Irish names in other parts of the world, but it’s really the only wrinkle in an otherwise fantastic new feature that really does cut down on the number of screen glances required to navigate a route, meaning it is now much safer.

New contacts icon

The ‘navigate to’ screen now features an address book icon where you can choose to use addresses saved in your contacts app as the destination. This could be handy for visiting relatives or friends for the first time or when you just can’t think of the best way to get to them from the part of town you’re in. Anything that cuts down on manual entry is a good thing!

One of the things that bothered me most in Mobile Maps before this update was that verbal announcements were played over the top of any music playing without any pausing or dimming. This often made announcements hard to hear and when you miss an announcement that means another screen glance which is not always safe. I always felt that ideally the music should fade to a minimal level, the announcement should be made over the top of it, then the music should fade back in to the normal level.

Mobile Maps almost gets there with this update — the music playing now gently fades out, but then it pauses for the announcement, and then un-pauses without a fade-in (actually I think it does fade in after all) meaning that the flow of the song is broken. But I’m nitpicking now — it’s likely that the APIs provided by Apple don’t allow for my ‘ideal’ scenario but this is close enough in the meantime. Certainly it’s much, much better than it was.

Sygic claim the GPS lock is now faster than ever however I always found it lightning fast anyway so I’ll have to take their word on that one. Certainly in my tests today I was not waiting for any more than a couple of seconds before my location had been obtained and the app was ready to navigate.

It’s great to see Sygic listening to customer feedback and responding with genuine improvements to the user experience. There are also a handful of other bug fixes and improvements included in this release which existing owners of Mobile Maps can grab for free. But what about those who don’t own the app and are confused as to which GPS nav app to buy? How does it stack up against the likes of TomTom now? Well, certainly the text-to-speech feature (missing from TomTom) gives Sygic Mobile Maps a big advantage, but add in the price-point of just $84.99 and the fact that Australia is also part of the package and you have a very compelling argument in favour of the underdog.

UPDATE 25/09/09 07:15 – Sygic have dropped the price to $64.99 for a limited time. What are you waiting for? Hit the link below to grab it while you can at that price.

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