Tuesday, September 28, 2010

NavFree on iPhone

Powered by NavMii a satellite navigation application, NavFree is offered for free in the iPhone App Store and iTunes. Here's the consumer test...

On first impressions I like the easy to use interface and the mapping is OpenStreetMap, which is fast becoming a favourite of mine.


With the map interface itself we are off to a flying start as it shows my current location, you can click on items of interest on the map, for example restaurants and it will display their name and how far away they are from your current location. From here you can click Route Here which will then calculate the route to your chosen destination or for other option you can click Options. You can zoom in or out of the map and change the view from 2D to 3D. A nice little feature is the iPod button which lets you play music through your iPhone while still being able to use the SatNav.

What will probably be much underutilised but is a great addition is the ability to report a fault with the mapping data, for example if a street name is wrong or you know a particular street is one-way you can report it. OpenStreetMap is built using such crowd-sourcing techniques and can only help to make this a richer datasource because of it, so for me this is a welcome addition.

NavFree allows you to search for a full address, postcode or points of interest (POI). Here I was a little frustrated, firstly attempting to find an existing postcode: Start typing a postcode in and it will present matching postcodes in a list below. However on at least one of the postcodes I tested it insisted on a space in order to find a match to sector level (e.g. SW1A 1) and then beyond this point would not find a match although at sector level it had displayed the postcode in the list.

In the same way the address search is frustrating, typing the full road name including road, street, close, etc returns no matches but without this matches are found. I do understand that once you have added the first part of the address you should then be able to find it from the list but try explaining that to your other half when you're already driving and want them to set up the SatNav. From what I can tell there is also little in the way of house number information and this may be where the full NavMii version comes in. Also, getting back to the home screeen once you start an address search is not straight forward as you have to press the back button a number of times.

The POI data seems to be fairly comprehensive for cafes and pubs but I couldn't get it to find any airports, the rest I will let you discover.

Like
OpenStreetMap
Crowd-Sourcing Map Error Reporting
Easy Map Interface

Dislike
Address, Postcode and POI search

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