iPhone GPS navigation apps

Since get­ting an iPhone 3GS a cou­ple weeks ago, I’ve been try­ing to reduce the num­ber of things in my car, start­ing with the Garmin nuvi, which I’ve never been thrilled with. Google Maps is fine if I’m going some­where famil­iar (most of cen­tral and south­ern Indiana, St. Louis and points in between), but I wanted another option for turn-by-turn directions.

Before tak­ing the plunge into some of the more expen­sive options, I tried MotionX GPS Drive ([iTunes link] / $2.99 plus $24.99/year or $2.99/mo. for turn-by-turn and voice guid­ance). I like the model because it allows you to pay as you need it from within the app, but the fact that I only get EDGE cov­er­age 90% of the time (liv­ing out­side AT&T’s 3G cov­er­age in Indiana) made it painfully slow to down­load maps, and in a test drive across town last night, I took a pur­pose­ful wrong turn and drove for a solid 3 min­utes after the app announced “Re-routing” and not updat­ing before I restarted the app.

The data issue, cou­pled with the trou­ble­some delay in re-routing, led me to the con­clu­sion that one of the more expen­sive solu­tions with onboard maps was the answer. I stud­ied every app in the App Store, read reviews, read inde­pen­dent reviews on the web, watched demos on YouTube, and talked to a cou­ple peo­ple before mak­ing my deci­sion this morn­ing. I nar­rowed my selec­tion to TomTom U.S. ([iTunes link] / $49.99 on sale through 12/28), Navigon MobileNavigator ([iTunes link] / $59.99 until 1/11/2010), and CoPilot Live ([iTunes link] / $19.99 on sale). My first PND was a TomTom One XL, so I was famil­iar with its pos­i­tive and neg­a­tive attrib­utes, and some reviews I’d read express­ing con­cern over out-of-date maps was a strike against it. CoPilot Live’s inter­face was one of the ugli­est I’ve seen, and I ruled it out almost imme­di­ately based on that. So this morn­ing, I pur­chased the Navigon app, since it was the most pos­i­tively reviewed both on the App Store and other sites I read. Using it to nav­i­gate from home to the cof­fee shop in Indianapolis I use as my remote office was utterly flaw­less, the voice guid­ance was clear and easy to under­stand, and the cou­ple of stops I made along the way off-route were han­dled imme­di­ately and with­out incident.

I don’t think I’m going to spring for the $24.99 life­time traf­fic add-on, because I don’t com­mute any­more, and Inrix Traffic ([iTunes link] / free) seems good enough for now; I checked it last night around rush hour, and it listed (and mapped) all the reported traf­fic acci­dents, con­ges­tion, and con­struc­tion around Indianapolis that I could incor­po­rate into my drive if necessary.

Navigon appears to update the app fre­quently, which might make for a painful down­load when they do because the maps are con­tained within the app (it weighs in at 1.47GB, which I still had plenty of room for on the 3GS), Coupled with a $25 Arkon dash­board fric­tion mount from Amazon (the most solid I’ve found so far with­out invest­ing in a ProClip sys­tem for $75), a car charger, and retractable 3.5mm audio cable (until the Griffin noise iso­la­tion cable arrives—I have a ground loop in the Prius that makes al kinds of noise), that makes me pretty happy.