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When people talk about sat nav software, the brand that comes to mind is TomTom. Unfortunately, the biggest player in the sat nav industry has not bothered to provide decent solutions for phones and PDAs. However, there are other software out there that promises to do the same job, like Nokia Maps, MapKing, etc. Here’s one that I’m currently using at the moment on my Nokia N78; it’s called Garmin Mobile XT. I’ve been using it for some time now. Let’s see if it’s up to the mark.

Garmin Mobile XT has different versions to run on Windows Mobile and Symbian S60. The biggest difference between the two is that you can use touchscreen on Windows Mobile to enter command. For the Symbian version, you can use it on Nokia E61, E66, E71, E90, N78, N79, N82, N95, and N96. The maps I’m using is the City Navigator Southeast Asia NT 2008. The software includes maps for Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, Indonesia, Hong Kong and Macau. All of these take about 160MB of space on the memory card.

Since Garmin Mobile XT is just a software, it requires a GPS receiver. If your device has an integrated GPS, simply enable it in the software. Else, you will need to hook up external bluetooth GPS to get the software to work. Since a bluetooth GPS could easily cost RM300, it’s better to just buy a new phone with integrated assisted-GPS receiver (A-GPS).

A-GPS enhances the startup time of the GPS to lock satellites within 30 seconds. This requires data connection, be it 3G or GPRS, to the assistance server that helps to speed up the GPS performance. From experience, it only costs 2 cents for the data connection whenever I startup the software. I don’t mind paying this when I’m able to lock in my location quickly from cold start. Other than that, there’s no other subscription fee to pay as GPS has always been a free service.

The main screen of Garmin Mobile XT is a fairly simple affair. There are two huge buttons to get you moving quickly. The built-in point of interest (POI) seems to be fairly well researched, and in plentiful supply. Weirdly, they are helpfully located within the “Food / Hotels” section – I have no idea what was wrong with “POIs” like everyone else uses. From the “Food / Hotels” section, you can quickly find petrol stations, hotels and cash machines in your local area.

You can set your destination in the “Where to” button. I rarely able to find my destination from the “Addresses” section. So instead of choosing “Addresses”, I would choose “Food / Hotels” and then spell my destination. At least from here, I could easily select my destination.

Once you have set up a route, you are met with a 3D representation of the road and a nice lady telling you what to do. You can change this if you wish as the turn-by-turn voice navigation function has many different voices in the database.

As with many sat navs, the 3D interface looks pretty cool, and is a decent representation of the road ahead. The view will zoom in and out, depending on both speed, and whether there are any turns required ahead. Although this sounds similar to TomTom, Garmin really zooms out – big style. It seems that it will zoom out until the next turn is visible on screen. If you make a wrong turn, the software would quickly recalculate routes so that you can still reach your destination using another route.

Your speed and heading is shown, plus you can access further screens – like the driving / trip time shown above – simply by hitting the soft keys. The 3D view will dim depending on the time, which is a nice touch. These are the day colours but it’ll swap to dark blue colours in the evening. It’s not just the 3D map view either – all the navigation menus will swap to darker colours so you won’t get blinded when you’re trying to navigate in the dark.

Within the Routing settings you can alter what vehicle you’re in. It’s set as “Car / Motorcycle” as default. It does have extra routing functions for different types of vehicles or even on foot – an area where it easily beats TomTom software. You can also tweak whether you’d like to get the fastest or the shortest route, plus you can alter what you’d like to avoid.

Another thing that could be useful is the ability to SMS your location to anyone – those with Garmin Mobile XT installed will see the option to navigate direct to the person who sent the message – those without the software will get the latitude/longitude position that can be put in to Google Maps or similar.

Another cool Garmin feature is “Track logs” which as you might guess, tracks your every move to the memory card, allowing input into Google Earth and other mapping tools. It will also allow you to replay a route. This single feature could be a winner for a lot of people – since TomTom has never bothered with it.

Garmin Mobile XT is a good piece of software. It works on all sorts of devices from a single card. My criticism is sadly due to the lack of thought put into some of the design work, and default settings. The navigation screen also updates far too slow – sometimes, but not always, to the point of being useless. This does depend on the device though – and you will need a decent CPU on board to get the most out of it.

However, what makes Garmin to get a positive conclusion from me, is purely and simply the price. It’s no TomTom, but since that company has all but ditched mobiles and PDAs, it’s good to see Garmin has stuck around, and are improving its software with each release. If you are buying your first GPS-enabled device, then adding Garmin XT to your purchase is an inexpensive way to get started with proper sat nav software.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 16th, 2008 at 10:43 AM and is filed under Gadgets. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.