Sat Nav Stuff

Sat Nav App - Waze

This doesn't cost a penny and is made by Waze inc. The maps are open street maps but are not downloadable.

Waze - Performance

Waze is installed easily and with minimal fuss. It quickly picked up the satellite signal and knew where we were and also seemed to perform well even when the mobile signal was quite poor.

It was easy to enter a new route, store favourite routes and navigate to some old favourites with a minimum of fuss and not too many buttons to press. It looks very nice and feels very intuitive to use. The routes it chose were always spot on and we never felt nervous about it taking us the wrong way.

Waze - Reporting Problems

The Waze Sat Nav App was extremely easy to report any problems we could see on the roads. We found it very simple to report traffic congestion and the odd road accident. It also very clearly showed us where other Waze users had reported problems ahead making these easy to avoid.

Waze - Maps continually Improve

Another thing we liked about Waze was the way that it collects map data to continuously improve the maps. When you start using it you are likely to find some roads around you that other people using Waze have not used yet. Waze has put little dots on these routes and encourages you to drive your car around like Pac Man, eating up the dots. They even give you rewards for doing this. Every now and again it also puts little goodies on the roads up ahead for you, which makes using it feels like playing a fun game at times.

Waze - Eating the dots is addictive

All this is to encourage people to use this Sat Nav Application continuously and keep reporting any potential traffic problems up ahead. We did find this a bit addictive at times though and found ourselves deliberately driving out of our way to eat up some more dots!

Waze - Positives

We liked this app because it is easy to use, looks very polished, does the job well and is free.

Waze - Negatives

The only thing that could be better is that it relies solely on a data signal so you need a mobile phone signal for it to work. You will need a data plan to avoid charges. As such this is not recommended for use abroad if your phone will have to use data roaming.