CoPilot Live UK & Ireland - £26
Frankly, we're impressed with CoPilot. At half the price of bigger names, you'd be forgiven for thinking that it had fewer features. In fact, this was one of our favourites.
The basic route-finding functionality worked great, though it did try to take us up a road that was closed to cars at the time. We liked how, at the end of a journey, a dialog asked us if we wanted to add another destination, and that it ducked background audio during spoken instructions.
The user interface is gaudy, but well engineered to save on-screen clutter. A very respectable app.
Score: 4/5
iGO My Way 2009 – Western Europe Edition - £53
This app was a real disappointment, but since it includes maps for Western Europe, it's actually good value.
It's not just that the interface is clumsy, it also fails in some pretty basic tasks; you can't navigate to contacts stored on your iPhone – though this is coming in the next free update – and, more worryingly, you can't enter postcodes at all.
Though tested in the same circumstances as the others, it sometimes lost its lock. Instructions were often confusing, and we had to take the iPhone out of our Car Kit to relaunch the app.
Score: 1.5/5
Navigon Mobile Navigator British Isles - £53
The first GPS app to launch remains one of the best. The spoken and visual instructions are clear and helpful, and it gently ducks background music to let the voice prompts be clearly heard.
A text-to-speech engine effectively reads out road names. There's one big problem, though; it doesn't do full postcode searches, so you can't rely on inputting postcodes to get you to your destinations.
Despite this, however, it made the best decisions about how to route us through Bath during our challenge.
Score: 4/5
Sygic Mobile Maps UK & Ireland - £30
The strong, graphic interface of the Sygic app is more than just cosmetic – it's easy to follow the clear on-screen map. It's just a shame that the text in the menu systems – and indeed even in the information bar at the bottom of the screen – is a little on the small side, and has relatively poor legibility.
Happily, it does full postcode searching and contacts look-up, though it can struggle to parse non-standard addresses.
It made one bad decision in our routing challenge, but it also picked a good route that no other app picked for one leg.
Score: 3.5/5
The winner: TomTom UK & Ireland - £60
By far the most polished of the apps here, TomTom's system feels like the app Apple itself would make.
Menus are very clear, data is easy to enter – it supports copy and paste – and the crisp, reserved on-screen graphics are a joy.
It is, however, the most expensive app here and, though it's capable of some brilliant insights about which route to take – thanks, we assume, to its IQ Routes tech that knows at what time of the day certain roads are busy – it did make a couple of bad mistakes in our route challenge.
Score: 4/5
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First published in MacFormat Issue 215
Liked this? Then check out Street to screen: how sat-nav maps are made
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