iGo My Way Car Navigation iPhone App Review
By Justin Lee | No CommentsLeave a Comment
Posted: Tuesday, November 24, 2009 at 6:53 pm

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There are more and more turn-by-turn navigation apps coming out for the iPhone 3GS; iGo My Way app for the iPhone 3G/3GS is one of them and costs $79.99. iGo can be found in other stand alone car gps units that you can buy from electronic stores, the interface is similar to the stand alone units. But does this iPhone app stand up to the stand alone units?

The main menu features an overhead map, Destination, My Route and Options. One not very intuitive function is, if you are being navigated, to return to the turn-by-turn/map screen, you must tap picture of map on the main menu, there is no “return” or “go back” button to get back there for some odd reason. The Destination button is pretty straight forward, you can enter an address or search by Points of Interest (POI), you can’t however use your contacts which is kind of odd.


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Once you’ve entered your address or chosen a POI, an over head map is shown that shows your route. You can’t really do anything in here which is kind of odd (such as zoom in to certain points or check turns). The Settings screen has the usual route options (car, truck, pedestrian). There are also a whole bunch voices you can choose from, English UK, English US, Espanol and French. iGo promises there will be an update for Text to speech, currently this version does not announce street names or exit names.

We tested a long route between Montreal, Canada and Portland, Maine (you’ll need a car charger, trust us). We printed out some maps to see if the iGo My Way would go the same route. The routing was good over all except up to a point where it took us off the main highway and then back onto the same highway a few km down, not sure why the routing algorithm did that. Finding POI’s such as grocery stores was fine, even in rural areas; the maps are current and will be updated for 1 year for free after your purchase.


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The main display while you are driving is easy to read, you have distances to your next turn, time and distance to your destination. The only odd part is in the stand alone versions of this software, the iGo shows the next two maneuvers on the bottom left (such as Turn Right in 10 KM, and below that Turn Left in 100 meters), the iPhone version does NOT have this. Since the iPhone version of iGo My Way only shows the NEXT maneuver and not next two maneuvers, if you have two rapid turns within a short distance, you’ll miss it for sure. There will also be lane indicators for many highways, this is very useful since there is no text to speech, a green sign will come up on the screen with a highlighted arrow showing you which lane or exit ramp you are to be in coming up soon.

The Estimated time of arrival for Canada seemed to be off for streets, as if there was no data in the Navteq maps. It would tell me I could arrive in a 3KM destination in 1 minute which is impossible with all the stop signs and traffic lights. While we were on the highway, the estimated times were much more accurate.

Graphics on iGo My Way for iPhone are top notch. Other GPS iPhone apps we’ve tested seem to take 2D maps and just angle it 3D, the streets and exits are much easier to read on iGo My Way than other turn-by-turn app out there.


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We also had some problems starting iGo My Way occasionally; it would simply not start and would sit on the loading screen with no progress bar. This happened about once out of every 10 times we launched it. While you can play music off your music collection while iGo My Way is directing you, it does not mute or lower the volume before announcing directions. IGo says this volume problem will be corrected in an update shortly, but currently you will be trying to hear the direction while music is blasting. A cool feature is the support for usb in a car, we plugged our iPhone 3GS into a Honda Civic 2009 USB port and played some music through the car stereo while navigating, no problems at all except the volume issue.

Over all, iGo My Way has great graphics, the routing algorithm is fine over all, we just wish it already had text to speech like other offerings such as Navigon and wouldn’t crash occasionally.