Gets me around Western Europe without drama

Its not perfect - the lack of compass support on iPhone 4 is annoying, and it was a bit clunky on my old iPhone 3, but TomTom Western Europe has been getting me around Western Europe for over a year now without any drama. I use the car kit because I dont see how to safely and conveniently use the device as a nav aid otherwise. The maps are relatively up to date and the software is reasonably reliable. Ive had a few crashes while route planning, but in over a year only had one lockup during driving, and that was during an all-day multi-country trip. A restart took around 10 seconds and the device picked up on the location immediately and was right back navigating the same route right away. Software updates are frequent and over the past year have fixed a few of the biggest annoyances. Only one voice (vaguely English accented female) attempts to pronounce street and city names, and it has gotten MUCH better over the past year with non-English names, and is laughably bad much less frequently. (Strange that its by a Dutch company and mangled trying to say "Den Hague" so badly until this last update!)

I felt compelled to post a review because of all the 1-star reviews. I dont think that any of the 1-star reviews were written by people familiar with GPS nav devices or their limitations. If you want to drive around all of Western Europe like a local and be able to go on road trips without any sort of maps or hassles, just buy the software and the car kit, smack it on your windscreen, and let it tell you where to go. If you are expecting it to do other things, well then maybe you might be disappointed but then again I dont know that any other GPS device would do any better. This is basically just a software version of TomTom, and lets you hit the road with one less digital device to worry about. Nothing more, nothing less. Any software which turns on the GPS chip in the iPhone will cause increased battery usage and the device to heat up. No GPS devices work reliably in city centers surrounded by high-rise buildings. GPS isnt in general accurate enough technology to use extensively for pedestrian-scale walking tours and the idea of walking around a new city staring at my phone instead of looking around is a bit of a head-scratcher to me (people would try this, really?) I did use it on foot this past weekend to find a restaurant in Luxembourg City center and it worked fine, so I dont understand the complaints. And if youve never tried to use a Garmin, you really cant appreciate how user-friendly Tom Toms software is! I recently bought my parents the latest-greatest Tom Tom standalone device, and I cant tell any major differences between it and my iPhone app except for the price.

Iphonekritik about TomTom Western Europe, v1.7