Satnavs: TomTom vs Google Maps vs Nokia Drive+ vs Apple Maps

Over a cup of tea in Jon’s cluttered kitchen, we ran through the rules for the day.

We had four fully fuelled cars, four satnav apps loaded onto four smartphones, and four intrepid drivers who had agreed to follow the instructions to whatever disastrous conclusion. If that sounds overly dramatic now, it didn’t feel like it at the time: we knew one poor soul would be at the mercy of Apple Maps.

The six destinations we’d be given varied in their detail. Some contained little more than a landmark name, others the salvation of a full address and postcode.

Four intrepid drivers had agreed to follow the instructions to whatever disastrous conclusion

In each case, the clock would start, we’d search for our destination using only the app we’d been assigned, and then make our way there as rapidly as (legally) possible. As a safety net, we set one more rule: if all reasonable in-app searches failed, we were permitted to perform a basic Google search for more information. We hoped it wouldn’t be needed. We were wrong.

Finally, the all-important draw was met by three ecstatic cheers and one predictable groan. TomTom on the iPhone 5 (UK edition: £39.99), our “control” sample if you like, went to delighted managing editor Priti Patel.

She was followed outside by reviews editor Jon Bray waving a Motorola Razr i loaded with the free Google Maps Navigation. Senior staff writer Mike Jennings bounded after them, ready to test another free app, Nokia Drive+ (now renamed Here Drive+) on his Lumia 920 (with a dash mount made of Velcro stickers).

This left the shortest straw for the shortest man: features editor David Bayon trudged out to his hire car wondering where Essex would be in Apple’s vision of England (Apple Maps; free).

As it turned out, he needn’t have feared the worst. Over the next six hours, our drivers went bird-watching and plane spotting, sought out a country pub and a Waitrose car park, and found holes in supposedly good apps and surprising strengths in others. Yes, even Apple Maps.

Fairlop Waters Golf Club (Forest Road, Barkingside, Ilford)

A short warm-up to get things running: the name of a nearby golf club, plus the street and the town – but no postcode. Just typing the first few letters brought results, so one by one our four cars pulled away from Jon’s house in both directions.

We got our first look at the four driving interfaces, each with its own take on the best way to give directions. We all arrived at the golf course in quick succession.

Alas, not the same part of the golf course. Google Maps took Jon straight to the main car park to the north of the course, where he had time for some twitching – he spotted a woodpecker, he excitedly told us all afterwards.

Jon was followed two minutes later by Mike, who’d had to pull a U-turn in Forest Road after Nokia Drive+ gave him a rather late instruction to turn into the poorly signposted golf club.

At around this time, David also found the golf course – although somewhere near the 13th fairway, in a dead end leading only to Redbridge Football Club.

“You have reached your destination,” announced Apple Maps, with a little note to say that actually getting to it may require walking. Given his car was sitting at the furthest possible point from the main entrance, that’s an interesting interpretation of “reached”.

Typing the first few letters again, he noticed a second golf club entry came up, identical but for a few lower-case letters. Selecting that, the app sent him back the way he came and round to the correct finishing point.
Amazingly, he wasn’t the last to arrive. The trusty TomTom app had guided Priti all the way to the course, and in fact she was right behind Mike when he pulled his U-turn – but the app told her to continue on to the next turning, a tight “unknown road” leading to an activity centre.

Okay, she was technically inside Fairlop Waters Country Park, but the 40-acre lake that is Fairlop Waters was blocking her route to a quick nine holes. After stressing over a seven-point turn, she found her way back with a bit of outside assistance. Passing dog walker, 1; TomTom, 0.

Stapleford Airfield

Warm-up complete, the next test was sadistic. Jon handed out paper slips containing the above two words – and nothing more. No road name, no postcode, not even a rough area in which to begin the search.

The place name proved no trouble for TomTom and Google Maps, so Priti and Jon were out of the car park within two minutes. David and Mike, meanwhile, sat engaged in a battle of patience, neither showing any sign of pulling away before the other.

The problem for Nokia Drive+ and Apple Maps was the same: they had no entry for Stapleford Airfield, Airport, Aerodrome nor any other air-related suffix. Mike was first to crawl out of the car park, having found a nearby village called Stapleford Abbotts and hoping he’d be able to wing it once he got there.

Two minutes later, David was on the move too. Having exhausted every possible search term, he’d reluctantly Googled the airfield and found it on Ongar Road. That name brought up a large empty space on Apple Maps that could feasibly have been an airfield if someone in the mapping department had bothered to label it as such. (If he’d thought to switch to satellite view, as he later did, he would have seen planes. Lots of planes.) It would have to do.

Priti was enjoying her smooth morning with TomTom, its clear instructions and large turn arrows making navigation easy for the most part.

The single hiccup saw her take a left turn she shouldn’t have, after a confusing “keep left” instruction put her into a filter lane.

This little diversion brought her in less than a minute after Jon. She watched light aircraft glide out of the grey sky to land on the runway behind the main hangar, and Jon went twitching again.

David was making his way fairly smoothly after the long planning delay, and was actually rather enjoying the company of Apple Maps. Its 3D display was clear, with mocked-up road signs to denote the next driver action. Voice instructions came nice and early, then were repeated just before a turn.

As he’d hoped, once on Ongar Road it was pretty obvious an airfield was coming up on the right, thanks to the fields full of planes. It was just a case of keeping an eye out for the entrance.

There was still no sign of Mike. Unbeknown to the others, he was skating sideways down icy country lanes, at one point passing Priti going the other way and almost running his Ford Focus over a bolting sheepdog.

Stopping in a pub car park to search again, Mike was by now more than a bit perturbed by the conditions; Nokia Drive+ then proceeded to make him drive up a snowy road, make a U-turn and then head back down the same road again.

He was then routed down a farmer’s driveway, where he saw the mirage of a windsock on the horizon. He was almost at the airfield, just on the opposite side to everyone else. An angry Bing search finally gave him the correct road name, and a flustered Mike tore into the car park 17 minutes after Jon.
Rainham Marshes RSPB

Windscreens were freezing over and Priti could barely speak, so the others gave Mike no time to compose himself before stage three.

Unfortunately, with only a name to go on once more, the problems for the two lesser satnavs (as it was becoming apparent) remained – but this time Mike wasn’t in the mood to hang around. When Nokia Drive+ came up with nothing at all for Rainham Marshes, he plumped for Marsh Lane, Rainham, and raced out of the car park on his way. It was probably the same thing, right?

Less burned by the previous challenge, David tried his best to come up with a route within Apple Maps. Alas, it recognised only the town of Rainham itself. Scrolling around the satellite images, there was a promising mass of green to the south without a single label on it.

He considered driving towards it and looking for signs, but instead opted for a compromise of Googling the name, knowing that would bring up a snapshot of the area – and sure enough it was the green mass. The entrance appeared to be on “New Tank Hill Road”, but entering that into Apple Maps produced “no results found” – despite the road being clearly visible on Apple’s map to the east of the reserve. So David did the only thing left to do, something frustrated Apple Maps users have been doing in vain since it launched: he dropped his own pin on the map, named it Rainham Marshes RSPB, and set off.

This route was longer than the previous two, and the first to head onto the M25, which showed off the four apps in a different light. TomTom’s lane assistance came into its own for Priti, guiding her effortlessly onto exit ramps – but that kind of luxury is the preserve of paid-for apps; the three freeloaders had to make do with a sharp eye for road signs, and the knowledge that “keep left” could either mean take the exit or just to stay in the left lane.

Voice instructions helped to an extent, but David found Apple Maps had an annoying habit of announcing an exit very early, then giving the reminder barely 100m from it.

Mike’s Marsh Lane turned out to be four miles from Rainham Marshes, so he Binged the postcode, and all four drivers arrived unscathed within ten minutes of each other. Time for coffee and a cake in the RSPB cafe, which we all knew Jon had chosen so he could try a pair of £1,000 binoculars.

The Old Windmill, South Hanningfield Road, Chelmsford, Essex CM3 8HJ

Still muttering something about chromatic aberration and ducks, Jon dished out the next set of instructions, and we were all relieved to see a destination with a full address and postcode.

We’d been chatting over lunch about our experience so far, and decided we should experiment a bit more. How do you experiment with a satnav? It was time for Siri to make an appearance.

“Directions to The Old Windmill pub in Chelmsford, Essex,” enunciated David. “There are 15 pubs matching ‘the old windmill’,” replied Siri within a second. Not bad, Siri. Let’s see, top of Siri’s list was… Oh. The Golden Lion in Bexleyheath. Followed by The Gun in Docklands, The Macbeth in Hoxton, and 12 other faraway pubs with neither “old” nor “windmill” in their names. Back in your box, Siri.

No such problems for Jon, who we later learned had been quietly using Google’s voice controls for his searches since Stapleford Airfield – with flawless results. “For the pub I just read out the full address, including postcode, and it found it straight away,” shrugged Jon, which explained how he’d been first out of every car park so far. He’s a competitive chap and we were driving on his turf; we’d just assumed he was cheating.
The presence of that all-important postcode made this test one of the simpler ones to begin with, and all four of us were on our way in no time. We took slightly different paths to the M25, but once on we all took a similar route, initially belting along the motorway before hitting the A127 and winding through the country lanes of Downham.

David was liking Apple’s navigation more with each successful journey, but also beginning to notice more flaws. It had no speedometer, no visible clock and no ETA, all of which became an issue as our test routes grew longer and more complex.

A tap of the screen brought up a timer that he could squint at, but he was reluctant to do so at 70mph. To add to the sense of confusion, while Apple Maps’ voice instructions stated the numbers of A-roads, often the screen listed the lesser-used street name instead, which led to at least one last-minute swerve across the lane markings.

The Old Windmill pub was lovely, with beams low enough to make a hunchback out of poor Mike. The team stopped for an orange juice and watched him show off Nokia Drive+’s automatic night mode, which flips the screen to a dark blue when the ambient light drops. Priti wasn’t paying attention, as we’d discover later.

Waitrose car park, Saffron Walden

The next one didn’t even require paper: we were to meet in the car park of Waitrose in Saffron Walden. Easy. David slapped those exact words into his phone (it goes without saying that Apple users have added all the Waitrose branches) and he was off, seconds behind Jon.

Mike followed soon after, but this time it was TomTom that had trouble, with Waitrose seemingly not something you’re supposed to search for. After a few tries in various search categories, Priti had to search for Saffron Walden itself, then for Waitrose as a place near there.

Leg five will henceforth be known as The One With The Roundabouts, as it was the hour in which they conspired to have their revenge. Jon pulled off the A12 at the eastern tip of Chelmsford, and proceeded to hit five of the hateful things in quick succession, his satnav spitting out early, medium and late warnings at each one until instructions began to overlap.

Was it the second exit at the first one and the third exit at the second one? Or the other way round? The screen struggled to keep up with the notifications, the traffic flowed too fast for Jon to get his bearings, and before he knew it he was pootling down the wrong exit into Sainsbury’s.

As if that wasn’t embarrassing enough, as he swung his Citroën Berlingo around yet another mini-roundabout to double back on himself, he glanced out of his window to see David following him down the same dead end. David tried to duck out of sight. Jon gave him a sheepish wave. They both decided not to mention it to the others.

Roundabouts were a common theme of the moaning after each stage, with incorrectly labelled exits and unclear instructions often causing confusion.

David had another on this leg where the voice instruction told him to “turn left” at a three-exit roundabout, even as the onscreen map pointed to the rightmost exit. A second roundabout immediately following may have been the culprit, as a left turn was the clear instruction for that one.

Jon followed Google’s roundabout instructions, but found they led to some odd routing choices, through tiny towns rather than main roads. Nokia Drive+ insisted on so many warnings about exits that Mike quickly stopped listening and relied on the visual prompts.
David arrived first; Apple Maps having effortlessly negotiated the one-way streets to the rear of Waitrose to bring him his choice of parking spaces. Not knowing how long the others would be, he paid and displayed, then saw Jon crawling into the multistorey next door a few minutes later.

Jon insisted he would have been first had Google Maps not mistakenly directed him to the front of Waitrose; Priti and then Mike rolled in ten minutes later, their apps making the same error. Apple had something to boast about for once.

Butler’s Retreat café, Ranger’s Road, Chingford

Daylight was fading fast as Jon handed out the final destination: a café in Chingford. We had a road name but no postcode. This proved fine for Jon and Mike, who were straight out and into the one-way system before David had even plugged his phone back in.

He typed Ranger’s Road into Apple Maps, but had a moment of panic when the journey was clocked at an hour and two minutes – was this the right road? To be sure, he searched for Chingford first then searched for the road; when the latter appeared within the former, he felt happy enough to set off – but then he saw Priti.

She was sitting in her driver’s seat, waving frantically. David hopped out to see what the problem was, and couldn’t help but laugh when she held up a dark-blue map with purple road markings. “Have I broken my app?” asked Priti, unaware that Mike had been showing her his night mode just hours earlier. One icon tap later she was back in the game, and she thanked her noble saviour by speeding away before he was even back in his seat.

It’s no exaggeration to say Apple’s location database is dreadful

Darkness fell as the team negotiated winding country lanes, and David failed to work out how to activate full beam on his hire car. Reaching the Butler’s Retreat Café and finding it closed, the others all had the good sense to continue to the Premier Inn next door to park up. David didn’t, and spent five minutes trying to turn his car around on a sheet of ice in the back garden. It had been a long day.

The results

If the past four pages have given the impression of a head-to-head between Apple and Nokia at times, that’s simply because the other two gave a much smoother ride.

TomTom proved (for the most part) every bit as reliable as you’d hope for £40, and Google Maps Navigation – while lacking useful tools such as lane assistance – has such good mapping and database credentials that it’s a great choice for the more casual driver.

You don’t even have to buy a proper dash mount, although for safety we’d still recommend it. Mike had no problems sticking his Lumia to the dashboard with Velcro, and Jon used an old suction mount and some chicken wire to make a perfectly solid holder for his Motorola. Free really can mean free if you have the right junk lying around at home.

As for Apple Maps and (to a lesser extent) Nokia Drive+, they’re both perfectly good at giving directions, and more than capable of being your main satnav – but only if you learn to play by certain rules.

It’s no exaggeration to say Apple’s location database is dreadful. The core maps are good and the places are all there, but finding them is a game of chance as you try different combinations and details.

Our conclusion, then, is faintly ridiculous: as long as you Google your destination beforehand to get a full address and postcode, you’ll be fine with Apple Maps. Hardly a ringing endorsement when Google Maps is free as well.