Sygic Drive

December 24th, 2009 nk Posted in GPS | No Comments »

We tested version 7.72 of Sygic Drive (also used to be known as McGuider). It has a pleasant interface and is easy to setup and use. It finds the GPS port and speed automatically if instructed to do so through the setup menu. Sygic found the satellites quickly.

The program has all the regular options: change the routing between Fast, Short, Economical and so forth; change the map display from 3D to Flat to Flat North, locale customization, language, distance units and keyboards.

We liked the way the program gives spoken instructions. It is probably one of the best around, though it has no Text To Speech and therefore doesn’t say the name of the next street (according to the company this option is coming soon). It does say the distance to the next turn and warns again before the turn. It also says the distance to the turn after that, if it comes up soon. The program is very good at telling the driver when to keep left or right in cases where the change in the road is not a clear turn. When driving on freeways it says the name of the road and also says the number of exit to take.

The program’s weakness is in finding Points Of Interest. The database was VERY slow on our WinCE 5 machine. Since the same machine runs iGO, Destinator, MioMap and others at a good speed, we suspect that Sygic Drive is to blame. There are several ways to search for POIs and all have the same weakness: they are slow and sometimes don’t find a point that is in the database. A search by name is normally painfully slow (one search took us close to 10 minutes) and often comes up empty. This is a serious defect.

Sygic Drive has no trouble finding addresses. The maps are supplied by TeleAtlas and, depending on locale, are fairly accurate, though we found the ones we tested not up to date.

Summary: Sygic Drive is a fairly good navigation program with very good non TTS spoken directions. It is quite bad at finding POIs, so be sure to know the address of the place you are going to. iGO and Destinator are better than Sygic Drive, but if the price is right Sygic is not a bad choice.