Are you still on the hunt for the right GPS navigation application? Sygic Mobile Maps [$59.00 - US iTunes Link] has just gotten a much needed update and we are happy to report is has polished this GPS app nicely. Gone is the lag we experienced along with the addition of some other much anticipated features.

• Now with text-to-speech - voice guidance announcing the name of the next street or road
• Choose addresses straight from your iPhone contacts and navigate to.
• Music playback fades out smoothly so you can better hear the voice instructions.
• Improved GPS lock, now faster than ever.
• Smoother position display as you follow your route.
• Increased font size of street names and information bars for improved readability.
• No disclaimer warning message after completion of phone call.

So if you currently have this application, update now! If not and you're still on the lookout for a good GPS app, Sygic Mobile Maps is definitely worth a look.

(Sygic MobileMaps US for iPhone Forum Review by cjvitek For more Forum Reviews, see the TiPb iPhone App Store Forum Review Index!)

In the turn by turn wars, Sygic has entered the fray with their Mobile Maps US. They also have versions for a number of other countries. Like all turn by turn apps, this one allows you to create navigation routes, utilize points of interest (POI), and assists in the actual driving of the route by giving you turn-by-turn directions. So how does it compare? Read on to find out.

In the interest of full disclosure, I received a promo code for this app.

First thing I want to say is I love the interface. Probably this was my favorite of all four apps I have tested so far. The buttons are clear and large, meaning they are easy to read and easy to selection. The options make sense (such as “route”, “settings”, “navigate to”). I never found myself trying to figure out what button I needed to hit.

The routing overview options are great – you can see the instructions, see the route as images, see a summary, see a demo of the route, and even show a large map with your route. Likewise, when choosing a navigation point, there are a number of clear options – point on a map, GPS position, city center, address, POI, etc. Unfortunately there is no integration with your iPhone contacts – something that I would consider almost essential for any turn by turn GPS app.

When creating a route, you have some nice options I haven’t seen in some of the other apps. You can choose shortest and fastest (pretty standard), but you can also choose economical, pedestrian, and bicycle. Unfortunately you need to choose these in the settings, and can’t adjust them on a trip by trip basis. You do have the option of requesting an “alternate route” once your route is created, but it will still use your existing preferences. You can also choose to add an intermediate point (travel via…) if you want to go by a specific city or town. You can also choose to avoid an upcoming segment (the next mile, the next ½ mile, etc). Unfortunately, you can’t do this in advance to avoid a specific segment of the trip, it only avoids the next immediate segment. Lastly, you can choose to avoid traffic delays, but I am not sure if this downloads actual traffic data, or bases it on travelling through a city center (or historical traffic data). I tried it a couple of times, but didn’t find any change in my planned route.

When driving, you can have a speed warning option turned on, that will warn you when you are going over a speed limit by a user-defined amount. There is supposed to be an audible warning, but I never heard one. In addition, the speed limits seemed somewhat variable – sometimes they were accurate, sometimes they were wrong, and sometimes they were missing. You have the option of defining some of the data that appears on the screen – ETA, distance remaining, speed, time remaining, etc. I like this a lot because it enables everyone to choose what information they would find most valuable. The driving interface is nice, pretty standard with views like “night time view”, and it can be viewed in landscape mode as well. The turn by turn directions are good, although it doesn’t read the street names (it does read highway route numbers, though). The voice also includes little qualifiers like “turn immediately” if you need to make a quick turn following another turn. I find information like this helpful when driving. You can also see the POI on the map as you are driving (and can choose which icons you are able to see). Unfortunately, I couldn’t find anyway within the app to disable the screen off function, so my screen kept turning off as I was driving.

So those are some of the good features about the Sygic app. Unfortunately, there were two really big flaws that were glaring. The first is when it comes to routing options – the routing options make no sense. Just like the other apps, I used this app to plan a route from Edinburg, TX to Terlingua, TX. A trip that I know is about 600 miles. I choose the shortest route, and it had me driving up THROUGH San Antonio – adding about 100 miles to the trip. I tried to hit “find alternate route”, and it took me up through Fort Worth…adding another 150 miles to the trip. So if I followed these directions, a 600 mile trip would have turned into a 700 or 850 mile trip. It was only after driving for about an hour on what I knew was the shortest route (or at least a shorter route) that the app finally gave me the instructions I wanted (which was calculated out to be shorter than the 700 miles it had suggested originally).

In addition, if you go off route, rather than trying to calculate a new route based on your current location, it seems to try to only get you BACK on to the previous route. So this app was telling me, at various times, to take a u-turn, drive back another 15 miles to the point where I went off the planned route, then continue from there. If I cancelled that route and created another one, that’s when it would then give me the best route from my current location.

Lastly, the maps seem very out of date. One of the first things I noticed was that the map for my home town didn’t have my street on it. Now, my street is fairly new (within the past 5 years) so maybe that was a simple mistake. But when I was planning my trip to Terlingua, TX, Terlingua didn’t even come up as a town in Texas! So in addition to missing roads, the app is missing whole towns. This may not be a factor if you are living in a large metropolitan area, but if could be a concern if you are living somewhere less developed (or travelling somewhere like that).

Driving around town I had no problems with this app. It seemed to have most of the POI that I was looking for (although the database was a little bit lacking). It also generally suggested reasonable routes to take (even if they weren’t the exact same ones I would have suggested). The real problems with this app came with the long distance travel.

Conclusion

All in all, there are many things I like about this app, but in the end the two glaring problems prevented me from giving it a strong recommendation. This app may be fine if you live and travel only in large, well known areas. But if you plan to go to smaller towns or visit newer roads, you will have a hard time using this app. These facts, combined with a few other flaws (lack of contact integration, poor route planning) leads me to reduce the rating, despite the great user interface and some nice features and options I haven’t seen on other TBT apps. For $39.99 [on sale, typically $59.99], I would expect to get accurate maps and better routing instructions. Three out of five stars. (I welcome and will post any comments from the app programmers in response to this review)

UPDATE

I just received an email from Sygic - contact integration and text to speech (reading road names) are going to be in the next update.

text-to-speech, i.e. voice guidance announcing the name of the next street or road in North America, Australia and New Zealand, the ability to choose addresses straight from iPhone contacts and navigate to them, smooth fading out of the music playback before the voice instructions, enhanced GPS lock, smoother position display when moving on the route. Also, the navigation will automatically resume after completion of phone call, without the need to tap the ‚Accept' button anymore.

Pros:

• Includes nice routing options
• Can avoid upcoming route segments
• Nice interface and customization options

Cons

• No contact integration
• Maps out of date
• Sometimes route choices are questionable

TiPb Review Rating

With news of TomTom hitting Apple's App Store it's time to start looking out for great deals from the other GPS apps currently available. Today we were notified that one of the most feature-filled GPS apps, Sygic Mobile Maps for the US is on sale for a limited time and it's priced to sell - $39.99. [iTunes Link]

We've used Sygic Mobile Maps and it is well worth $39.99 if you are within the United States. The sale ends at the end of this month so be sure to act fast! It contains some very nice features with some of the highlights as followed:

• Voice guided turn-by-turn GPS navigation
• Rotation sensor for automatic switching between landscape/portrait operation in real-time
• Automatic return to the app and the route after a phone call
• All important safety features, including lane assistance, speed limit indication, safety cameras, information about railway crossings and dangerous areas
• Thousands of POIs; among others also a list of parking options nearby for you to select and be guided to selection between car and bicycle modes for optimum route calculation
• All the maps will be stored on the device, there will be no need to download data on the go, which otherwise costs unnecessary waiting time and money

Screen shots after the break!

Dieter gave us our first eyes-on look at Sygic's Turn-by-Turn GPS solution for the iPhone 3G, but we wondered if Apple -- whose iPhone SDK specifically forbid providing such navigation -- would ever allow it.

Seems Sygic thinks they will:

Sygic is entering the AppStore to be the first on the market that offers full turn-by-turn navigation for Apple users. “We believe Apple users will benefit soon from Sygic Mobile 2009 turn-by-turn navigation worldwide – the same as all of our customers on different platforms” said Michal Stencl, CEO and founder of Sygic.

Could this be part of a new Premium App Store launch later today? Our tipper, antonioj, seems to think it will...

Only 2 hours left, so be sure to join us for our live meta-blog coverage and hopefully we'll find out together!

There you see it, folks, a real live native iPhone app that provides turn-by-turn GPS directions with voice prompts, points of interest, support for multiple countries, maps stored in-memory instead of streamed from the internet, the whole nine yards.

Working off a tip/reminder from antonioj (thanks!), I scurried off to the TeleAtlas booth at the close day here at MWC to visit Sygic, a company that makes (you guessed it) downloadable GPS apps for smartphones and PDAs. They had promised a demo of their iPhone app at MWC09 and, well, they delivered.

Read on for more!

Sygic, as we said, looks to be a full-featured GPS app that stores all the maps on-memory (about 2 gigs for Europe). It uses TeleAtlas maps as a base -- whether that means that they'll be able to successfully navigate both the legal briar patch surrounding turn-by-turn on the iPhone and manage to make Apple forget about their SDK explicitly prohibiting such apps remains to be seen. For now (although I didn't drive around with it), I can say that Sygic works and seems snappy enough. It took the software shown about 30 seconds to load up and initialize, however, which didn't fill me with glee.

Otherwise, you can pretty much see the featureset from the gallery below. Sygic says they will submit to the app store and see how it rolls, there's no real intention of just releasing it as a jailbreak app. What do you think, will Apple accept the app or are they still holding out for a cut of that sweet, sweet TeleNav subscription fee? Or is the hold-up with turn-by-turn something else entirely?