TomTom brings its great history and reputation in the GPS industry to the iPhone and gives us a fairly good and simple GPS app. Their app, while featuring the top quality TomTom IQ Routes and maps for the US and Canada, is a little short on extra features.

     Routing is one of the most important features of a GPS app. TomTom’s routing options are very good, but very simple. It’s difficult to create a route with more than one stop. Your destination selection is done very well and includes the ability to set a point on the map, point of interest from the app’s database, a contact address, recents, etc.

     The inclusion of IQ Routes, a TomTom feature that uses historical traffic data to determine the fastest route for the time of day you are traveling, is a welcome addition and seems to work well. In addition you can set the route for travel by car, bike, or for walking. However there are a few routing features it was missing such as saving routes for future trips, multi-stop routes, and editing of routes.

     Of all of the GPS applications I’ve tried, TomTom is the most iPhone like. They’ve paid attention to the user interface and made it both iPhone like and kept the buttons large for quick use while driving.

     What’s there is really well done, but it’s a bit short on features. TomTom is missing some of those cool features of the standalone TomTom devices such as live traffic and local fuel prices. The routing features that are there are only meant to get you from point a to point b, right now. Also missing are any form of lane assist and text-to-speech functions to speak the street names.

     Unfortunately TomTom hasn’t announced any plans to add these features. In fact they’ve been rather quiet on any future plans. We can only guess that they will eventually be added but we have no idea if they will be free or a paid additions.

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