iPhone App Reviewed: Navigon GPS Navigation

The GPS facilities of the iPhone were long time praised before they actually got used at full capacity. Location based services in iPhone appeared long before full fledged GPS navigation apps and iPhone users perceived this hardware feature as just another cool way to see the nearest pizza restaurant.

Well, during the last few months, things have changed. Introducing Navigon, one of the first iPhone GPS navigation apps available on App Store.

iPhone Navigon Basics

First of all, Navigon is a very expensive app compared with the general price on the APP store. A few months ago, when I bought it, it was 99 EUR. And that was Navigon Europe, which includes, as you may imagine, only the maps for Europe. There are several other flavors of Navigon – read it: other maps of the world – including Australia, North America, Eastern Europe and so on. The price of this editions is around 70 EUR each.

Second, keep in mind that Navigon is a hungry app. Not only it will eat up to 1.5 Gigabytes of your precious storage space, but it will also slow down significantly your iPhone. The overall experience of using it is a little bit slower than using just a vanilla GPS.

And third, Navigon works directly with your GPS receiver in the iPhone, which means you don’t need internet access to make it work. This is a huge feature, as data roaming costs are still horrendously unaffordable. In other words, this is an app which makes the GPS receiver in the iPhone actually useful.

iPhone Navigon Interface

When you start Navigon this is what you get:

iPhone Navigon GPS Interface

And this is pretty much all it does.

Enter an Address – will allow you to enter a city, a country and then a street and number. As you may imagine there is an autocompletion feature helping you chose faster from pre-populated fields. After that, you can chose “Start Navigation” and it will actually start to navigate just like any other GPS device you know.

Search for POI – this will allow you to search for a Point Of Interest around your current location. POIs includes restaurants, hotels, gas stations and so on. Data seems pretty accurate, at least for the Europe map, which is the only one I bought.

Take Me Home – this options allow you to specify a “home” address and then take you directly there. It’s kind of a shortcut. Works pretty well.

Show Map – will do exactly what you expect, showing you the current map, something like in the image below

iPhone Navigon GPS Show Map

The toolbar allows you to access your Favorites addresses (other than your Home address)

iPhone Navigon GPS Favorites

and the Recent addresses

iPhone Navigon GPS Recent Addresses

Navigon also gives you access to a lot of options, including speed limits, GPS options and so on. There are so many options there and to be honest I just used the route profile one (specifying your speed: pedestrian, car or boat).

iPhone Navigon GPS Options

The latest version of Navigon includes voice guidance, exactly as you have it in a standard GPS device.

iPhone Navigon Conclusions

If you’re going to travel a lot, have different transportation systems (car, pedestrian or boat) and love having your iPhone with you, than Navigon is a must. It’s by far one of the slickest ways to find your way around, if you don’t care too much about your battery life. Maps seems also pretty accurate and as a Navigon client you will have access to free maps updates. As for the actual navigation interface, this is a little bit simpler than I’m used to, but I guess this is, up to some extent, a feature.

On the bad side, Navigon have a pretty high price, but still lower than a decent GPS standalone device. The battery consumption is absolutely insane. I’ve never been able to keep it running in the GPS mode for more than 2 hours before the battery went completely dry. And one thing you must keep in mind is that on a standard iPhone (not an Iphone 3 GS) the interface can get really slow. I suppose on an iPhone 3GS things will be a little better.

All in all, provided you are a traveler and an iPhone lover at the same time, Navigon is a really good iPhone app.