Review: iGO My Way 2009 Australia / New Zealand

iGO My Way

Another day, another GPS turn-by-turn navigation app! Or at least that’s the way it seems with so many coming along recently. This time we’re looking at iGO My Way 2009 from NNG Global Services of Hungary. By now the turn-by-turn GPS navigation app market is becoming pretty saturated with some very solid offerings from reputable companies already on the table, so any new entrant is going to have to put out something pretty compelling to compete with the established choices — so does iGO cut it? Read on for our review.

iGO splash screen

By this stage we are all well aware of the basic functions of a GPS app, and what to expect of them. As we’ve seen in our reviews of the other apps out there, the core look and feel is all much-of-a-much — tiled, touch-screen menus, 3D maps, spoken driving directions, the ability to look up POI such as restaurants, shops and petrol stations, and so on and so forth. So what, if anything, makes iGO different to the rest?

Well, for one thing it has to be said that iGO’s menu structure is among the best we’ve seen. Often-times the menus of these apps are cluttered with so many options that you get the feeling that you still don’t quite know your way around the app as well as you should even after using it several times. iGO is very different in that respect – the number of menu items is reduced to only what is required, leaving a startlingly simple environment to control yet without any compromise on function.

Minimalist Menu

When you first launch the app, the splash screen stays on-screen for several seconds while a GPS lock is achieved (a progress indicator lets you know what’s going on). Once this has been done, the app bounces into life with its minimalist UI. A snapshot of your current destination is shown at the top of the screen and if you’re re-launching the app part-way along an existing one just tap the ‘show map’ image and you’ll be taken to your current route. The options ‘Destination’ and ‘My Route’ which are underneath gives you additional options. ‘Destination’ is obviously what you’ll want to hit if you’re starting out on a new journey, and ‘My Route’ is what you’ll want if you want to add your current route to your favourites, alter the route (shortest, longest etc) or view a demo of your route.

Simulate your route from here

You’ll no doubt have spotted the ‘More’ button in the screenshot and probably assume that that’s where it all becomes cluttered but no — pressing this gives just two further options: ‘Music’ (for iPod controls) and ‘Settings’. Even the settings sub-menu is sensibly and clearly laid out — there are no oversized icons on dozens of panels you need to swipe through to get anywhere here, just a normal iPhone-style list of headings that lead to well worded and simple options that turn on or off with tick-boxes. The menus all appear and collapse with a nice 3D flip animation, too.

Typing 'MOO' in the left results in the right

Entering a destination is nice and easy — As usual it’s done in reverse order, so first you pick the city but it does not make you name the suburb which is great if you’re in a city you don’t know that well (and hey, that’s what these apps are for!). Once you’re at the point where you’re entering the street name the buttons take up the entire screen which is great for operating on the dash of your car, but thanks to predictive entry it doesn’t even make you type the whole street name. Just enter the first three or four characters and you’ll be taken to a list of possible matches. iGO also holds a history of recently entered addresses so that you don’t need to manually re-enter recent destinations.

Calcualting route

Once the destination is locked in you can alter your route to follow the fastest, shortest, easiest or most economical route with fastest being the default. Once the route is calculated you can easily find petrol stations, restaurants and parking along the selected route by tapping ‘menu’ and ‘find places’, and add them to the route.

Find Places

The map itself (the important bit!) is very nice. It is clear and uncluttered and the 3D animation is as smooth as silk. Roads glide into view and the names of nearby streets appear in small speech-bubble style labels as they get closer to your current position.

The main navigation screen

When a route has been calculated, the overall distance, time left and estimated arrival time are shown on the lower-left of the screen, one on top of the other. If you only want to see one of these three items you can simply tap that item to hide the other two. Tapping it again will bring all three back. On the top-left of the display you will see an icon depicting the direction of the next turn and the distance to it. Tapping this icon will repeat the last verbal instruction.

The hand of God?

On the right-hand of the screen you will see an icon of a small hand. Tapping this gives you the ability to zoom out and pan around your current location using either on-screen arrows or the pinch-to-zoom gestures we know and love. Obviously you’ll want to be pulled over and in a stationery position to use this but it’s a great way of getting a feel for what’s around you. I’m not sure that any of the other apps offer this.

The 'Quick Menu' and 'Help Nearby' features

The ‘Menu’ button on the lower-right of the screen will take you back to the main menu I described earlier, and tapping anywhere else on the screen will take you to a ‘Quick Menu’ where you can adjust the map view from 3D to 2D, alter the zoom, the colours of the map, and also access a ‘Where Am I?’ screen which will tell you your precise current location. Within this screen is a ‘Help Nearby’ button which will help you find and direct you to the closest car repair, police station, hospital or ATM to your current location which is handy, although I would have thought that locations and directions to petrol stations should probably be in this list too.

Where am I?

The ‘Quick Menu’ also has basic access to your iPod controls (play, previous and next) and there is also the option to ‘Boost’ your GPS signal — while I was out driving I turned boost on but I couldn’t see an obvious difference to the quality of the signal. Overall the signal quality and accuracy is as good as any other iPhone GPS app with the usual quirks — some days when I tested it it was spot on, other times there was a few seconds delay, other times it couldn’t seem to get a particularly good signal at all and would lose me at intersections. Interestingly, I drove from Christchurch to Oxford recently and whilst driving along Tram Road on a beautiful blue-sky day it announced ‘GPS signal lost’ and never picked me up again. I switched to Sygic Mobile Maps and it found me instantly, which I found rather odd.

The quality of the verbal announcements is not great and is the one thing that really lets this app down. There are four English-language voices to choose from – American and Australian male and female. On all four voices the quality is pretty awful and sounds over-amplified, resulting in a distorted and staticy sound. There is no text-to-speech (where street names are spoken) but we’re told that a future upgrade will add this feature. Why it’s not already part of the app is beyond me – text-to-speech is becoming an expected feature by this stage.

The options there but it deosn't seem to be working!

One other thing it doesn’t seem to do is tell you what speed you are doing, the speed limit of the current road or alert you when you are speeding. It also doesn’t tell you when you are approaching a speed camera.The options are in the menu, but for some reason around Christchurch and en-route to and around Dunedin it didn’t work for me. In my opinion this is a basic requirement of any GPS app and this is certainly something that needs to be refined and working in a future update.

iGO's 3D 'features'

There are a couple of other ‘features’ that are unique to iGO but they are more gimmicks than actual features. One is the ability to change the arrow depicting your current location on the map to a 3D vehicle — there are cars, trucks, buses, even a magic carpet! The other is 3D buildings, which sounds cool but in reality is a little disappointing. Here in Christchurch there are just three 3D buildings on offer as far as I can tell – one is the Cathedral (predictably), one is the building with the Aquarium in it and the other is The Press building. Honestly, I’m not sure they serve any real purpose, but they’re a bit of fun — if only there were more of them.

So the bottom line is that this is another great quality GPS app which arguably has the edge over the competition in terms of UI and ease-of-use, but lacks some crucial functions such as text-to-speech (for now) and speed limit warnings. Right now, the app is priced at $94.99 which is listed as a promotional price. The normal price is unknown, but I have made enquiries and will update this post once I have it.

– iGO My Way 2009 Australia / New Zealand