Slashdot Mirror
Google's Free Satnav Outperforms TomTom
Barence writes "A real-world road test of several different satnav systems has found that the free Google Maps Navigation outperformed TomTom's premium GPS unit. PC Pro put the satnavs through four different real-world tests, covering country roads, inner-city traffic and motorway driving. The Google satnav finished the four tests more than half an hour ahead of the top of the range TomTom Go 950 Live. 'For those in rural areas or people who spend hours in their car every day, we believe the investment in a dedicated satnav device or software will still pay off,' PC Pro concludes. 'But for the recreational user, it's amazing what you can get for free.'"
I love using Google Navigation on my Android Phone, but it's short-sighted to say that just because I'm not paying extra for "Navigation" that the cost of this service is completely free. It's all part of the relatively expensive "Google Smart Phone" bundle.
With the enormous caveat that:
'As yet, there's also no way of downloading [Google] maps to a memory card for offline navigation, so you could have major problems in areas without a 3G signal'
"For those in rural areas or people who spend hours in their car every day, we believe the investment in a dedicated satnav device or software will still pay off,"
really? I grew up in a rural area, and I spent hours in a car commuting because things were so far away... and I question this. There were two possible routes south from my hometown, one was about 150km to the closest big down, the other route was about 250km to the same place.
gee, hard choice there, better get out the GPS...
The more rural the area, the fewer route choices, and thusly the less importance a GPS due to the lack of choice.
the preceding post was not spell checked... suck it.
So the free google offering out performed the rest, but they still recommend buying one rather then the google offering?
Yeah, it's not like they explained that the inability of cell phones to adequately and consistently lock onto the GPS satellite signals, or the reliance of some of these phones to have a strong 3G data signal played into that decision...
I have been using a dedicated tomtom device and now also google nav on the Nexus 1. And I agree in most nav cases Google nav is better, if you have an online connection. Thats the biggest issue, roaming forget it, having a flakey 3g connection forget it, as soon as you have to go offroads you need the connection to recalculate the route.
The pathfinding on googles solution is up to par to Tomtom or even slightly better, but the voice output is where it shines. At least for the german tomtom the voice output is sometimes kindof weird and while using a Tomtom I often give a last final look at a voice command which is not drive left or right to check whether the voice output is the same as the display. That never happened on googles nav to me, the voice output always has been preceise. Add to that that Tomtom never added text2speech to my OneXL or I never got a combined european map (while they sold new devices with exactly the same map), and I will retire it soon, one customer lost to Tomtom who will never return thanks to their arrogance regarding their products.
For offline driving I am still undecided whether I will stick with Copilot but I will probably switch to Navigon, which still has way better voice output than anything Tomtom ever delivered.
Is that Google's solution is not free because it requires a data connection on your phone. When traveling in foreign countries this is usually prohibitively expensive.
With TomTom you can purchase foreign maps and use them without "per use" data charges.
Actually, Nokia likely has the best solution in this regard - they give you free maps/navigation on your own phone (so nothing to purchase) but you can pick the countries and pre-load their maps on your phone. You then do not need an active data connection to navigate.
For what it's worth - TomTom and other standalone makers are probably the losers in this. These devices are consolidating and phone manufacturers are emerging as winners.
This reminds me of something I've contemplated numerous times before, which is the realm of generic, multipurpose hardware. Everything is converging - GPS receivers, phones, PDAs, cameras - because it simply makes sense. There are two problems with this.
One is that there are certain physical controls and form factors that are more conducive to certain uses. For example, many phones aren't the best cameras because it's too easy to cover the lens, the "shutter" button is not in an ergonomic location, etc.
The other is that often the devices need to be used simultaneously. And I don't mean multitasking, I mean two devices visible and usable at the exact same time.
I just can't help but wonder if, as the price of components drop (like all-in-one chipsets, LCD panels, etc), if there will be a market for iPad / iPod Touch like devices that are essentially generic computing devices with integrated connectivity, GPS, camera, etc. There would be various physical form factors available - like touchscreen only, buttons on the sides, fold out keyboard, an SLR sort of design. Thus I would buy a $150 generic device and designate it as the GPS in my car. Obviously most people can't afford cellular service for every piece of hardware, so these devices would have to operate in an offline / standalone mode, like as a GPS. Or better yet they would all "tether" via bluetooth or wifi off of my actual cellular device.
Anyway I'm just wondering when or if this will happen. Obviously with companies like Apple charging a premium for a generic device (iPad / iPod Touch) that's not going to happen soon. But I'm sure there are manufactures that could produce the equivalent hardware, today, for $199.
Better known as 318230.
Driving around Edinburgh, it kept trying to tell me to turn off the North Bridge onto Market Street. Great, except they're separated by about 20 metres vertically. Going along Market Street, it told me to turn left onto North Bridge - what, in a helicopter, or something?
Who knows what other hideous failings it might have? Telling people to drive off cliffs, or into the sea? "Oh but it *looks like* you can..."
My Droid does have a windshield mount, but its navigation UI needs a lot of help:
- small buttons
- not as responsive as tomtom
- no way to route around traffic delays
- requires a data connection (yes, there are a few places in the US that doesn't have good data service)
- useless if you get an incoming call or want to make an outbound call
- no way of storing favorites (with three taps I can find my way home or get a list of favorites on my tomtom)
That's not to say that Google Navigation is really poor. I like having constantly updated maps and more timely traffic information, and I'd prefer to have only one device on my windshield, but until those above problems get fixed, I'll keep my TomTom.
Free software running on free maps (OSM) would be fair to call free. Then we could argue about the quality of the maps or the quality of the navigation, but I'm still waiting for this option which is likely to be the only free solution.
The article is astoundingly hard to read. Apparently they took a bunch of GPS devices, gave each one to a driver, who was in a different car. They all started at the same place and time, and were told to go to the same destination. They had to follow the instructions of their device and follow the speed limit. OK. Sounds good.
But they all did this only one time. You would need to do this many times before you could start to draw conclusions from it. Sure, it is fun to play scientist and get out in the world and do some sciency fieldwork, but seriously. Anybody who has taken basic statistics ought to understand that meaningful conclusions can't be drawn from this because of the huge variance of travel times as a function of local traffic. Sure, the cars all start and end at the same spots, but they take different paths. If one path that would otherwise be the fastest is slowed down because of a car accident or an adorable family of ducks is walking on the roadside, that will skew the results for this single trial only.
It makes me sad that this sort of thing passes for research, and it makes me even sadder that people don't think critically enough to realize it is not reliable.
Uh, no. 15A at 12v isn't the same as 15A at 110v.
15A at 12v is only 180 watts of power.
15A at 110v is 1650 watts of power.
However, you're correct, 180 watts is certainly far more than any cell phone uses, the GP post is clearly wrong. Cell phone batteries are typically something like a max of 1 amp hour at 3.2 volts. If the phone exceeded a 10A (conservative) at 12v draw, even in a worst case scenario where they are using an analog regulator to drop it to 5V charging current and therefore only harvesting 10A at 5V, that would mean that the phone could only run for a maximum of 6 minutes on a fully charged internal battery doing 3G. Actually it wouldn't work at all, because if you tried to draw 10 amps out of a 1 amp hour LiIon battery, it'd catch fire (or more likely, just pop a polyswitch and shut down your phone).
But you can pair your phone to an external Bluetooth GPS unit (at least Ovi Maps lets me do so, don't know about Google). Also note that you'd normally download the maps for the region you expect to use your GPS through WiFi, and not on the road (which was the major "problem" they found with Ovi). If you remove the extra time they took to download the maps on Ovi due to sheer incompetence, it performed on par with TomTom. Slower than Google, but with the added benefit of not requiring data at all.
I'd say Nokia and Google offering free navigation is somewhat like all phones offering somewhat decent cameras. You won't replace all GPSs with phones, just like even a Nokia N8 won't replace a Canon 1Dmk4 or an ultrazoom compact; but for most people in most situations, the phone will be enough (just like there's no point in carrying an extra supercompact camera if you have a good camera phone).
I had this problem too until I bought a 1000 mA USB car adapter to replace the 500 mA adapter that I had.
As someone that is somewhat knowledgeable about in-car navigation systems, sure, go ahead and compare some free web service to TomTom. While you are at it, compare Magellen as well. They are going to be about the same.
You can also compare most of the in-car systems (built-in and aftermarket) and see they are all about the same - mostly crap but often much better than a paper map. The displays aren't terrific and can be hard to see sometimes in direct sun. Also, the routing is debatable and the POI (Point Of Interest) listings are usually out of date, when available at all.
Yes, there may be updates, but it takes the company long enough to build the map database from source materials that it is assured to be out of date by the time the user gets it. This is very, very annoying when trying to use such systems in areas experiencing significant growth.
So now you have a uniformly negative opinion of navigation systems, right? Then compare what you have seen with a Garmin unit. Their processing path for the data gets current data out to the user much, much faster than other companies doing this. The POI database is much more usable and the UI is much better. Yeah, I carry a Garmin around with me.
So please, if you are going to compare systems, compare something real that works for the user. TomTom is cheap and pretty popular, but it doesn't have the UI or the data to really do a good job.
No, I didn't use to work for Garmin - I worked for a US-based map data vendor. And we helped a lot of people build in-car systems and were usually disappointed at some of the choices they made. But we had to remain pretty neutral.
I had this problem too until I bought a 1000 mA USB car adapter to replace the 500 mA adapter that I had.
which, of course, means it's not the cigarette lighter - it's the charger that's at fault
antipaucity
Having spent some time on the HTC Desire forums it seems a lot of people are suffering the issue that the phone loses charge while plugged in and being used as a sat nav device. Part of the problem seems to be that most of the micro usb car chargers are only delivering 500ma, and keeping that big display turned on with sound and locking onto a signal is burning a lot of power. Apparently some cables do provide closer to the 1000ma charge and this seems to help (I can't speak for any of this personally, never tried to use mine as a sat nav, but it's come up enough times independently for me to believe there's some validity to the claims).
I'd say that it is free. You would have bought the phone anyway, and there's (effectively) zero marginal cost to add the extra navigation features.
Side note: I was looking at cheap geocaching GPSes and was stunned to see what Garmin charges for GPS updates. Holy crap! It's like the razor-and-blade business model, except that the razor is also ludicrously priced. I can't think of a single reason why I would buy a dedicated GPS unit instead of putting those few hundred dollars towards a smartphone and having all the extra features they offer.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Like the Android Market purchasing, Google Maps navigation doesn't work globally yet.
So, until Google Maps works also in all the countries on Earth I wouldn't say anything about outperforming a dedicated navigator that will navigate you anywhere for which location you have the maps in the device.
Get Navit. OSM and open source software all downloaded on the phone FTW
You're not old until regret takes the place of your dreams.
Well, Google would probably love to "accidentally" know the geographic distribution of its users at all times...
One that hath name thou can not otter