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Smartphone-navigation packages are expensive. Route 66 Mobile 7 (http://www.route66.nl) and TomTom Mobile 5
(http://www.tomtom.nl) cost for example around €300 for
Benelux-coverage and add €100- €150 to that for European
coverage. To keep your maps up-to-date, you will have to buy updates on a
regular basis. Nav4All (http://www.Nav4All.com) will
change all this, with an affordable solution for off-board navigation. Also
see our news on Nav4All of April, 2006.
With
off-board navigation you will only need to install a small program on your
mobile. Maps are downloaded
from a server on the internet via a mobile network, by gprs
or umts. You only need to add a GPS receiver,
which is connected to your mobile by Bluetooth. Nav4All offers such a GPS receiver for
the bargain price of only €70. Also the use of Nav4All is free till August 16th, 2006.
After that there will be an affordable subscription (around €1 a
month).
Affordable Navigation by Nav4All
Many supported mobile phones
Nav4All works based on
Java. Because of that there are lots of mobile phones which are supported.
You can think of the Sony Ericsson K750i and W800i, and the Nokia 6230i and
6680, and the N70 on which we tested the application ourselves. With some
models of Samsung and Motorola there are still some problems, because it
seems to be difficult for developers to read the data coming from the
Bluetooth GPS receiver from Java. In the future these models will also be
supported.
Your mobile phone subscription should be ready for GPRS. This
can be quite expensive. The data consumption is very limited, because
there’s only a data connection for calculating the route. Some
operators charge far too much for data traffic. Fortunately for example
T-Mobile offers Pocket Internet Total for only €9.50 a month, which
allows you to make unlimited use of GPRS. Also other operators have
affordable packages. Telfort charges you for a package of 20 MB €10 a
month.
If you haven’t done this before, you will have to start
with setting up your gprs-connection. Nav4All has many tips for this presented
on their website. You can start the installation by navigating with your
phone’s web browser to http://www.Nav4All.com/install.
After installation of the program you can also download voices. The
installation is very simple.
Start-up screen and download of audio files
Selection of connection type and language selection
Bluetooth gps receiver is found quickly
Worldwide navigation
Nav4All is a Dutch initiative,
but they certainly aren’t mainly focused on the Dutch market. The
website is available in 56 languages, and you can make a selection of more
than 100 voices! Nav4All is a
worldwide registered brand. The number of countries where you can use Nav4All is amazing. Next to the standard
countries, there is even coverage of all roads in Poland, big cities in Russia, Chili en Argentina,
recently whole Australia,
and soon China and Korea.
Choosing a route is easy. Via the option Navigate to... you
can enter an address. This can be an address in The Netherlands, but also
addresses outside The Netherlands. You can also go to your home address,
the office, favorites, previous destinations, points of interest
(there’s a huge list of for example restaurants, hotels and
airports), coordinates (Longitude, Latitude), and your parking place. For
the latter you will to choose Remember my parking place first in the
Startmenu.
The extended Start menu
Search an address
Simplicity is central during navigation
Simplicity is central during navigation. Simple arrows tell
you where to go. When going straight ahead, the arrow points to the top.
Under this arrow the remaining kilometers till instruction are displayed.
Just before the instruction, the arrow points to the left or the right and
displays the remaining kilometers. A roundabout is simply displayed as a
circle, where a black arrow displays the direction. The voice tells you
where to change lane or take a turn. First 400 meters before the turn, and
repeated just before the turn.
The voice sounds a little too enthusiastic, but the voice
instructions are perfect and the sound is very clear. When you are speeding
a subtle warning sounds ('Pay attention'). Basically you don’t even
need the instructions on the screen anymore. It is handy though to see how
much meters are left till the next instruction. You can use Nav4All perfectly with the GPS receiver
placed on your dashboard and your phone in the pocket of your jacket.
Essentially Nav4All is meant to be
used like this; as a co-driver. So a car holder for your phone is not
needed initially.
Left: a roundabout, right: two instructions right after each other
Number of lanes is displayed and can be heard at a bifurcation
Warning when you drive faster then the allowed speed
Also maps are available
Although you get simple arrows presented during navigation,
maps are available in the program. For example you can retrieve a map of
your route, or retrieve a map of your destination. On both screenshots
below you see the map of a chosen route to Bottrop
(Germany).
Below that you see a map of a route from Noord-Holland
to Nieuwegein, and next to that a map of the
destination.
During navigation you can access another screen with the arrow
keys of your mobile. This is an extended list of all route directions, and
details about the destination. Navigating with a map displayed is not
possible, but this wouldn’t add much anyhow. It would be handy if
besides the direction also the estimated time of arrival would be displayed
on the screen.
Also very easy to go across the border, for example Bottrop
(Germany)
Left: a map of our destination in The Netherlands, right: our route to
Germany
Extended route-information
Maps are very up-to-date
Nav4All uses maps of the
digital map supplier Navteq.
Navteq
releases every quarter a big update, but also has more frequent smaller
updates. Besides the big updates, Nav4All
also has the smaller more frequent Navteq
updates installed on their servers. This is why you always have the most
up-to-date maps at your disposal. This is a very nice accomplishment
because updating maps seems to be a pretty difficult process for owners of
other navigation systems. The maps of Wayfinder are not up-to-date, and
Activepilot of Jentro even has to shut down its servers every 6 months to
update it’s maps.
Another advantage of Nav4All
is that for calculating a route much more details are taken in
consideration. For example Nav4All
takes into consideration that because of the daily food market you are only
allowed to drive on the Albert Cuyp, Amsterdam during the
evening from Monday till Saturday and Sunday. There are many more examples
like this. Map supplier Navteq
stores this kind of information in its maps, and Nav4All takes it into consideration when
calculating a route for you. Providers of on-board navigation systems
don’t do anything with this kind of information.
Small problems
During our test we ran into some minor problems. The screen of
the Nokia N70 switches after some time to a screensaver, and a little bit
later the screen switches off completely. The Nav4All software has a setting to keep
the light switched on always, but this doesn’t seem to have effect.
The voice instructions continue though while the screen is switched off.
Via the menu Instruments/Settings/Phone on the N70 en the
option Display you can setup the time-out for the lighting (standard 15
seconds, maximum 60 seconds) and energy saving (standard 1 minute, maximum
30 minutes). Also without the light switched on we can still read the
instructions from the screen. Because the lighting for the screen uses much
of your battery, it is not advisable to keep the light switched on. How
long your phone is going to work without charging is something you will
have to find out yourselves. Maybe a car charger can help you out while
being on the road.
As soon as your route is calculated the complete route is
downloaded at once. There’s a recalculation needed as soon as you leave
the calculated route. Here suddenly we had a strange timeout message which
you can see below. According to Nav4All
there are some sensitivities in the mobile
networks of operators, which combined with certain mobile phones can cause
problems. Within several months operators will have these problems solved.
A problem with calculating the route because of a time-out
Early version
Nav4All is at the very
beginning of her existence. Officially it would be released in September 2006.
For testing the website was already finished. When this was discovered by a
group in Sweden, the Nav4All was used by thousands, after
which the program was also discovered in Finland. Meanwhile The
Netherlands are getting to know Nav4All
as well. At first people at newsgroups and forums started discussing about Nav4All. Eventually this ‘buzz
strategy’ could make the product known all over the world, like for
example happened to Skype in its early days. Nav4All does not do active promotion.
Till August 15th, 2006 the use of the product is
for free. Also new functions will be added, which will make the product
even more complete. Speed traps and traffic information will be added
possibly this summer. Although in case of the speed traps the question is
where to get ‘reliable’ data. Also Tracking and Tracing will be
added soon. With a simple computer program people at home can see where
selected Nav4All users are located.
Possibly this will be projected on the free map of Google Earth.
All this taken into consideration we give Nav4All a good chance to reach the
market. The navigation solutions of Route66 and TomTom are much easier to
install because you only need to insert a memory card into your phone. But Nav4All is much cheaper, so potential
users are happy to take the extra time of the setting up their gprs. You do have to monitor your data traffic. The
program itself is very easy to use. There’s no manual, but
there’s no use for it actually.
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Gerelateerd nieuws:
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 Gratis navigatie op mobieltjes met Nav4All
(14-04-2006)
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