I woke up this morning to what I thought was a welcoming surprise: a TomTom iPhone app update! Yes, it's true, TomTom finally realized that they still had an app sitting in the App Store just waiting to be updated with all kinds of glorious new features. As it turns out, the update only addresses a couple of key issues and according to some early user reviews, those issues weren't addressed that well.
TomTom's iPhone app hit the App Store in mid-August to many users' delight, or at least what they thought would be a delight. In its first iteration, the app lacked many features including the highly sought after text-to-speech functionality. To make things worse, the app's GPS precision was fairly lackluster and it constantly lost a signal. Some users even complained about the way the app handled and searched for addresses, as well as its sometimes clunky interface. But its rare to get things right the first time, just look at all of the time and effort Navigon put into updating their
MobileNavigator app, so users decided to wait patiently. After nearly two months of waiting, TomTom has finally issued their very first update to their iPhone app.
The
TomTom v1.1 update features enhanced GPS technology that according to TomTom, "shows your location on the map with greater precision" and "follows your car more accurately while you drive." That sounds good, right? It also handles more address formats, including abbreviations, and has better support for US addresses. Perfect, but that's it?! No text-to-speech? No option for real-time traffic?
Well, at least they have finally started updating the app. I recently took a very, very long road trip with my TomTom iPhone app and the GPS signal was constantly dropping out, so I can't wait to test it again after this recent update. But it does leave me wondering just how long it will take to get the next update. Hopefully it's not another two months.
