TomTom for Symbian OS Series 60 (3-rd Edition).
I’ve got today the last component HOLUX BT mouse that makes possible car navigation with my mobile phone Nokia N73. Several days ago I acquired navigation software TomTom for Symbian OS. Being a navagation systems developer myself I know from my experience that TomTom is a very qualitative product. All the details like approximation of the speed and location, route maps and the whole usability are really well done. That’s why I was very curious about TomTom for mobile phones. And I wasn’t dissapointed.
The application started really quickly. My Bluetooth was off so TomTom asked me, whether I wish to activate it. Just one or two seconds later my GPS mouse was found! That’s really astonishing. I never coded for Symbian OS, but I guess that one needs also to open a COM port and to look whether the GPS mouse is hanging on it. In the worst case your program should run through all the ports and wait more then one second on each of them… Great! one point for TomTom.
The next thing that surprised me pleasantly was the fact that the map was also loaded very quickly. I have only experience with Windows Mobile 5.0 and it take a bit more time there till directX gets initialized.
Navigation itself is impressive too. In comparison to T-Mobile Navigation software for example TomTom is absolutly the leader. TomTom calculated the shortest way to my home indeed and gave me the right instructions even when I drove in a tunnel without GPS signal (as I alredy said imho the approximation heuristics is great).
The only discomfort I found so far is the case when you want to make a call during the navigation process. On the second or on the third menu page there is an item “Make a call”, but there happened nothing when I pressed it. So I had to exit the application in order to call my friend.
So in general I’m very satisfied with TomTom and my Hardware. By the way, I didn’t mention, but I guess it can be helpfull for somebody. HOLUX BT mouse has recommended itself as a nice device. In several blogs I read that the people have problems to build a connection with their BT mouse. I tested HOLUX with various PDAs like ASUS, HP, MDA III etc. and now with my Nokia N73. It works! And it works well. It needs just a couple of seconds to find the satalites (as a comparison Fujitsu-Siemens Pocket LOOX with Sirf III GPS reciever needs about 10 minutes for this process) and the precision is then only few meters.