Today at Atelier Kaz - ex-Honda R&D, F1, Indy/CART engineer

Finally, the Tom Tom App for android showed up on the Google Play store.

Although Tom Tom announced long time ago that they were working on this,
the main focus seemed to be the development and support for the iPhone app that
I felt it would never come out within this year.

It’s still ver.1.0 so I’m not going to buy it yet although
the current introductory price will no doubt go up in the near future.
May be they will do Christmas or future sale as the number of
purchase has dropped significantly after the initial surge.


I don’t have any specific preference for the sat nav but
as my first device was from Tom Tom,
I just got used to their user I/F so would like to carry on with them.

On the Play store, CoPilot Live seemed to be very popular but
I have never purchased any of the paid version of sat nav software so
don’t know how good it is.

For the free app, Google Map still seemed to be the leader of the category
especially after the official release of offline cashed map feature allowing
the users to carry their map without connecting to the internet but
at this stage, we can’t use it for the navigation so you will need to
use your data packet allowance for this.


Navfree is OK-ish because their map data seemed to be very old and
sometimes took me in a strange route compared to my old Tom Tom device but
good thing with this app is that you have all the map data on your mobile phone
so you can browse through it, although the user I/F is not great.

You can’t even pinch zoom the map so you have to manually
press the + / - button for zoom in and out.


If you live in a busy city area, Waze is a great app to know the
realtime traffic info.

You will rely on other users to report on any traffic jam, accident,
speed cam, etc so unless someone is using the app on the route that
you are about to take, not much use but I normally use Google map to
get some idea on the route and use Waze before leaving to
find out any issues on the way.


Let’s see how Tom Tom app will improve in the future and hope I can try it.
It would have been much better if they have released free trial version with
limited features so that the user can try it first on their mobile before
committing to buy it.

Kaz