Steve's Navigation Weekend of Frustrating Freebies
This is 2008 and, being away from home, I wanted to revisit some of the free satellite navigation applications that I'd previously played with over a year ago - surely one of them had developed into something that could get me home? Or is successful real time navigation still the preserve of the commercial applications like Nokia Maps, Wayfinder, CoPilot, etc.?
The challenge, I'd have thought, wasn't too difficult. I had a fully charged Nokia N95, with latest firmware and built-in Assisted-GPS (of course). Time to get helped home by trying out several of the free navigation systems in their latest versions.
amAze
From my experiences last year, I remember amAze as giving a slick experience and... well... working. It seems that this has gone backwards in every measurable way since 2007. Step 1 was to try and download the app. It took my three attempts to get to a valid download page and then I was presented with a temporary user name and password. Err... what? Why do I need this? There's not even a way of copying it to the clipboard, so I had to write these down on a piece of paper(!). Ugh.
Scrolling down the page showed two different versions for the N95, one signed and one err... not. Messy. I plumped for the signed one and installation then proceeded as normal. Starting amAze from the apps menu showed an initial pretty loading screen - and then, a few seconds later, an error message 'Communication problem'.
I tried again. And again, after making sure that both GPS and data connection were OK. Same error, absolutely nowhere to go. I tried again two hours later and all was the same. Were amAze's servers down today? Who knows - I couldn't see a status message telling me of downtime.
Not a good start to my journey home then.
Nav4All
The 'other' free navigation suite for GPS-enabled smartphones, Nav4All got further than amAze - which wasn't hard. It was easier to download too, just pick the download link and you're in. One complication was that there's a companion module, Nav4AllSys, which needs installing by the app after the initial startup - I have absolutely no idea why this isn't part of the initial Java archive - comments welcome. Still, only a minor hiccup, I thought.
Things were proceeding in welcome fashion - I got prompted to choose a language and then download the voice guidance files, thankfully only a megabyte or so. Requesting 'GPS information' showed my location perfectly from the N95's internal GPS and choosing 'Map' showed exactly where I was, albeit in rather crude diagrammatic form. Still....
Piece of cake, I thought to myself. And free until 2010. A deadline which gets extended every year, so effectively free forever? I punched in my home postcode and the road address was brought up very quickly. I hit 'next', in order to start navigating. An error message, 'no GPRS 5', came up. What? What's GPRS got to do with anything - I was on a strong 3G signal and under an open sky, so no problems with GPS. And what's the '5' bit all about? I tried using 'Recalc' on the pop-up menu but all I got was an interminable 'Calculating...' message and trying to go back in via the main menu just brought up the 'no GPRS 5' error.
All very strange. Nav4All knew where I was, it knew where I was going to, and it even calculated the rough distance away and general direction (as far as I could tell) - I tried several times over the course of a couple of hours and it never once gave me a single route instruction.
Failed. Sigh.
Google Maps for Mobile
If you've tried this yourself, you'll know that it's not strictly a satellite navigation system - at least not yet. Free for everybody to use, it provides GPS or cell-tower-driven location data, showing you the roads or satellite imagery around you. Heavy on the data, it's true, but extremely useful. For the last year or so, there have been native versions for the major smartphone platforms, so, unlike Nav4All and amAze, this is (in this case) a fully native S60 application, able to do just about anything it wants to (Google being able to afford the Symbian Signing fees, of course!).
So, with this in mind, what I want to know is: "Why haven't Google implemented at least rudimentary real time route calculation and prompting?" There are no technical limitations and, again, Google isn't short of manpower or money. Here's how the current route calculation system works.
Having set your destination, either by searching by postcode or address, or simply by picking a spot from a map, you then have to go through a slightly tortuous 'Start point/End point' dialog, manually filling in the start point by using a menu option - given that 99.9% of users will be wanting to go from their current position, this is simply a poor UI choice. Then there's another menu option needed, 'Get directions', and finally 'Show'. Time consuming and messy.
You're then left to step through the route junctions, one by one. There's a flashing blue dot to show where you are at the moment, but there's no attempt to track your progress through a route by auto-advancing the instructions, something which would be programming childs-play. When the next junction is a kilometre or so away, the blue dot is nowhere to be seen, typically, and following a planned route is almost impossible to do safely if you're the driver and have no passenger to molly-coddle Google Maps for Mobile. AND there's no easy way of saying 'Recalculate from where I am now, please'. Instead, you have to go back into the 'Directions' dialog and semi-manually fill in start and end points all over again. And so on. By which time you've driven another kilometre and the directions are possibly out of date anyway.
As a pedestrian, this step-by-step routing works very well, and the blue dot is always visible. But it's laughable for a driver.
It would be sooooo easy for Google to go the extra mile and take their Maps for Mobile product into real-time territory - even auto-stepping through junctions as the blue dot passed each would be a huge step forwards. Maybe they haven't got the vision. Or maybe they're purposefully avoiding overlapping the functionality of the major commercial packages for fear of annoying a large software industry? Who knows.
Did I get home OK? Yes, using Google Maps for Mobile and stopping every mile or two to work out what the heck it was telling me. Not a good weekend for freebie sat-nav solutions then......
Steve Litchfield, All About Symbian, 1 June 2008
Published by Steve Litchfield at 20:08 BST, June 1st 2008
Categories: Comment, Software
Platforms: General, S60 3rd Edition
Feature Discussion
There are some very suspect 'tests' done by one of the free ones also, which claims popular paid for satnavs are dangerous.
Its at times like this nokia maps would start to become attractive. If someone is going to install a satnav program they dont use often, then the subscription method is surely going to be a no brainer.
Just a shame that the subscription options are so bad.
I would suggest giving Nav4All a second try.
P.S. I found Amaze to be very poorly.
[quote]Nav4All is superior in advanced tests: TomTom and Nokia Maps both got a negative buying advice.[/quote]
[url]http://www.stichtingonderzoeknavigatiesystemen.nl/eng/certificates2.php[/url]
I did ask them about how they went about these tests, but never got a reply.
And until recently, some of the domain registration information of nav4all.nl and the domain of the site where the reports are held had some very similar information.
Funnily enough, just 2 days after I pointed it out it changed ;)
With their recent update adding diamond indicators at junctions though, they certainly look like they're getting there though. Features like map rotation (to make the direction you're heading always be "up" - should be quick and easy with OpenGL ES?) and some form of direction indicator when you are reaching junctions would provide good basic functionality.
100% in agreement on the option to have your current location set as the default start point for directions.
Still any company that would stoop that low lacks any integrity. I wonder how they would treat your privacy.
There are PNA tests of the respected german ADAC which are more reliable. I think testing PNA in map details and routing in practice is rather difficult and time consuming I think. Mostly it would be judging userinterface, speed, stability, gps-accuracy and built quality. None however tested Nav4All or Nokia Maps.
Steve -- glad to see you're still using Sunrise by PiZero!
Indeed, and I have formed my own opinion of it, in addition to a very suspicious post on another forum which first got me checking.
There are an increasing number of free satnav solutions coming available, but none look to be anywhere near the quality of paid for ones.
@ Nokia Maps has send me twice into the wrong directions and I only could get back on track after a complete power off and reboot. But then so did my Garmin eTrexx Vista once or twice (not counting the time it was in the same pocket as the gsm). Luckily my built-in biological navigation system was not to shabby, telling me the north star was in the wrong place.
I've also found that and external (bluetooth) GPS receiver is essential, even if the N95 inbuilt can be used by the mapping software.
The mobile phone navigation is nearly there but not quite there yet.
I recommend it over Nokia Maps for its ease of use, great accuracy and abundance of practical non-showy features.
It's never let me down once.
My experience with navigation programs and free navigation programs is as follows:
On a E61 (symbian)
Route66 works great
Wayfinder works great
On Motorola Q9 (Windows mobile smartphone)
Wayfinder works with some quirks but is usable
Nav4all works reasonably well
To tell some more about the last one:
The start up is a bit slow of Nav4all.
Adress search is very slow and sometimes there are problems with Nav4all and the querty keyboard of my Q9. A restart of the program solves this.
Navigation works very well on the Q9 and is pleasant. I like the speed warnings and the way (by arrows) the next junction is shown. For a free program it is definitely a
winner and it beats Wayfinder at the moment because of the small problems Wayfinder has with my Q9.
The best thing about both is that you'll always have the latest maps available. :)
Too bad Steve, you couldn't test Nav4all a bit more.
And by the way: The promotional research on the website of Nav4all is rubbish in my opinion. I've read the article and it doesn't make sense.
Wouter
it's still not great, but I see from GMM 2.1 to get an updated route from your current location when already displaying a route, you can press '0', Select, Arrow down ("Directions from here"), Select.
We are both on mobile broadband. I am on 3 contract and his phone is on Vodafone contract.Really frustrating!
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