Navigon 7

September 14th, 2009 admin Posted in GPS | No Comments »

We tested two versions of the Navigon software: a version for Windows Mobile (on a HTC Artemis phone) and a version running on a dedicated GPS device.

Navigon is supposed to have a number of advanced features:

Panorama View 3d is supposed to show a 3D view of the terrain you are traveling through,
Reality View Pro shows a realistic view of freeway interchanges and city streets,
Clever Parking is supposed to find parking near your destination,
Lane Assist Pro shows a detailed view of an intersection to help staying in the correct lane,
Text to Speech (TTS) is supposed to say the name of the next street you are going to turn on

We were unable to test most of the features on the US map we had – they didn’t work. The only two features that did work was the Lane Assist and TTS (to some extent).

The software has a nice interface, though it shows a warning screen and asks for assurance that the user will drive carefully. It is a bit annoying and takes unnecessary time every time you start it. It does have a feature that shuts Navigon off when the power supply is unplugged. This may be useful in a dedicated device.

Installation went smoothly, but Navigon’s wizard couldn’t find the GPS on the HTC phone. I had to enter the information manually. After that it acquired the satellites reasonably fast.

We first tried navigating using a US map. The routing was reasonable, though the program is slower than others we tested (especially iGO). The TTS worked only to a limited extent – it said the names of freeways and freeway exits. It did not say the names of any other streets. The only direction was “turn left” or “turn right”.
There was a problem with one of the major interchanges: the instructions were contradictory and confusing. This particular interchange requires a right turn from the freeway and than an immediate left. Navigon said: “keep left” when approaching the interchange, which was misleading as keeping left would prevent a safe right turn.

The Lane Assist was a disappointment since it shows a small image of the lanes you need to chose. The display is marginal on a 4.3″ display and is useless on a phone display. The way it is designed, to much attention needs to be dedicated to this display making it useless while traveling through a complicated interchange.

We continued testing with European maps. Since we are located in the US we could only simulate (Demo) the routes we chose. We didn’t find significant differences between the European and US performance. Our test didn’t show the advanced feature Navigon is advertising. I am sure they exist, but we were unable to check them out.

Our conclusion: Navigon is a fairly good GPS program. The US maps seem to be up to date, at least in comparison with other vendor’s maps. Finding a Point of Interest or an address is easy and routing is reasonable. It is possible to add a via point to a route. We didn’t find a way to view a complete route on the map. For some reason when we tried using Clever Parking the program always told us that there are no known parking places near our destination.

After testing Navigon we would still recommend iGO or Destinator. Even if all the features Navigon advertises work as they are supposed to, they would still be quite useless on a small display and distracting while driving.