Sometime next week, what is arguably the most overpriced app for the iPhone, TomTom, will add a very basic feature for its genre – pronounced street names. Should we be excited?

There probably has not been an app for the iPhone that produced more hype than the TomTom GPS system. It was announced with incredible hyperbole at an official Apple event. It took what seemed like forever to be released after that announcement. When it was announced, it was both too expensive and a disappointment. At $100, the app itself was a lot of money. It takes forever to install or upgrade, it is very slow on a 3G phone, it has been missing basic features, and apparently the only way to make it really usable is to more than double the original price and buy a  car kit.

Now, finally, TomTom has added the missing feature that has puzzled many users. As reported in a New York Times blog, the TomTom app will soon do what GPS apps have been doing for years: it will actually enunciate the name of the street, road, or highway which represents your next turn. And, oh by the way, it may also actually do so before you have reached the point where you have to make that turn. This is, of course, supposed to endear the TomTom app to its users.

Now that it is one of many, we that laid out $100 for the app, and are now being asked to lay out another $120 to (maybe) make it work, one must wonder how many of us that spent the original $100 will decide to spend the extra money. A lot of us may well just shake out heads and walk away from the app before we throw good money after bad. The TomTom app is, of course, far from the top-rated GPS application in the app store. It is third, judging by the most charitable criteria of users. It still does lead the pack, however, in price.

My personal experience is that the TomTom app often gets confused when you actually have the temerity to turn, and if there is another turn within a minute or so, TomTom will fail to even know that it is there while it tries to catch up with reality. Are we supposed to spend another $120 on the off chance that paying a total of $220 may actually make make the thing usable in real-world situations? Many of us will not. Many of us will write off TomTom as a bad idea and buy something else. Both CoPilot and MobileNavigator are better and cost less. In fact, it is difficult to see where the TomTom app is any better than the GPS Drive, which is virtually free by comparison and often performs better, at least for me.

Unfortunately, hype is worthless when it comes to navigating from point A to point B. In the end, the TomTom app seems to me to be more hype than reality. It costs way too much and it performs much too poorly, at least for me. One of the reasons I bought my iPhone was the promise of a GPS application. I refuse, though, to spend more for GPS than I spent for the phone itself. Your mileage may vary, but so far TomTom represents the lowest point of my iPhone experience.

What does your experience with TomTom tell you?

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Entry was posted on Friday, November 13th, 2009 at 2:03 pm under Commercial Software, Opinion, iPhone.  Print This Post

Read more entries by Michael W. Jones.
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