European nav app first out of the gate for iPhone

Yes this is more than we all wanted for turn-by-turn nav, but it's for a Europe-wide version. Which is huge. Scale it down to smaller territories and it should be more compelling. TomTom offer a UK and Europe version over here in the UK - with the UK one being a fair bit cheaper. Navigon should release a UK only version for less, and the same for each other country. Most users won't need a pan-continent turn-by-turn device...

I believe TomTom will release a range of Apps for UK and Europe and other countries. Navigon need to do that too.

My regular GPS is Navigon and it's a big disappointment.

Today we made very short, but interesting video.

iPhone 3G sw 3.0 with installed Navigon MobileNavigator
compared to
Navigon 7210 GPS

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXENhmX_uOU

Just purchased the Sygic app so I can use it in Australia... Works well!

Yes, I would love it if the price of the app was cheaper... but I would assume that most of the cost of even dedicated nav units is in the software design...

One thing that is *slightly* annoying is the name as it appears on the iPhone's springboard... the name is too long... please Sygic, rename it if you can?

I'm pretty tempted to buy this Navigon solution. Why? I don't have a nav unit anymore - I had TomTom on my Nokia N95 but traffic info subscriptions got terminated suddenly - I had to buy some new traffic solution but, sorry, not available for your setup. I still feel they played a trick on me. Won't buy TT anymore.

Navigon is doing a pretty good job with their nav. systems. They do work well and have up to date maps. Summer holidays are coming and I reserved $200 for a good nav. system (yes, I do need one with lots of European countries, UK + western + eastern europe). TT is planning to sell those seperately with seperate apps. That's a no go for me. Navigon sells 40 countries in a single package. That's more like it. But no traffic info, no TMC (yet?), no handsfree phone setup, no FM transmitter. So, as a basic nav system it seems allright.

People having installed Navigon are pretty enthousiastic: the software is quick and informational. And, it's not too expensive either IMO. On Youtube it can be seen the phone and nav system do work simultaneously: an incoming phone call will push the nav software to the background although nav instructions will still be given while the phone is ringing (pretty weird). Having answered the phone, it should be possible to push the phone app to the background and to get the nav software back in the front - while talking (didn't see this yet on Youtube).

So, I'm gonna wait until june 29th to see what the competition will be doing. Otherwise I'll just buy Navigon.

Interesting but I'm going to wait until TomTom has released their software and hardware, and it and whatever else has been released has been reviewed. As noted, the price is quite expensive so I will want to ensure that I select the best option rather than simply the first one, particularly given apparent flaws in the software, such as not continuing to run during a phone call. Certainly I do not plan on chopping and changing between GPS applications unless there is a damned good reason to do so. At the moment I am more interested in the TomTom offering if only for the proposed hardware that should improve reception and make the whole thing easier to use.

I bought it, I tried it and I like it. It works great on my 3G iphone, and as I didn't own a standalone device yet, 75 Euros is an okay price in my view. A few improvements have to be made though. You can play music while the navigator is running, but it doesn't silence the music for the voice announcements, for exmple. Navigation is fine though, better than I expected, and more precise than the dated TomTom software on my retired Nokia E61 with an external dedicated bluetooth GPS receiver.
I admit that the price might make it less appealing for some, but for me there are two main reasons to buy it.
1. I don't want an extra device to carry around, and if you leave a standalone TomTom or even only it's holder in your car, sooner or later someone is going to smash the window and try to steal it.
2. The other option would be to wait for the TomTom package, which will almost certainly be more expensive because you will be forced to buy it with it's dedicated mounting bracket.

As far as phone calls while driving are concerned, I usually stop and somewhere and call back anyway. Safer that way.

the sygic app for australia/NZ looks promising. will be taking a trip to australia and NZ next month and was hoping to put a GPS navigation app on my phone to help with driving there. sygic might be the only one available for awhile, so we'll see.

just want to make sure that no data connection is required to use any of sygic's turn-by-turn functionalities. i know that other app - the $9.99/month app - still requires a data connection. but if sygic provides the maps (which i believe they do at over a gig download), i wouldn't need the data connection to be turned on, right?

damn and i was looking to return my tomtom.
well i wouldnt pay more than 60 bucks for the app. for gods sake its just software. i am sure they would want to sell me maps in a year or two for 60 bucks again. i would pay 50 for the software and 30 for the cradle thingy.
i cannot justify paying more than 80 bucks when an iphone costs 99! and a cheap tom tom is around 130

I agree with the "overpriced" faction of this discussion. While it adds some nice feacutes, people should be aware that navigation just stops while they are making calls. While this might be tolerable on endless stretches of highways, it makes the app totally unusable under more realistic European driving conditions where you may see turn-announcments every few minutes on countryside roads - and even more frequent while driving in cities. From this point of view, it means to use this program you have to refrain from using your iPhone for any other purposes while using this app. So is it better - or only as good - as a standalone device? No - it is inferior to it!

So what makes it so expensive? It's probably the royalties they have to pay for use of the map data. These guys (and I understand there are only two companies worldwide to provide these data) seem to be the ones that rip of most of the profits from growing popularity of mobile GPS devices. So what do you expect from such a monopoly? I can only hope that public-domain projects like Openstreetmap.org get more power behind to create some competition here - and finally get the prices down for nice, but not really groundbreaking pieses of software like TomTom or MobileNavigator!