Sygic Aura GPS Navigation
Beautiful maps at a reasonable price, but has too many quirks
Price: £29 (£35 inc VAT), W. Europe
Platform: Android, iOS, Maemo, Symbian, Windows Mobile
Traffic: £15 (£18 inc VAT) Europe
Performance: ★★★
Features: ★★★
Value for money: ★★★
Overall: ★★★
Sygic’s sat-nav app is available across a range of platforms. You can download it via the Android Market, and it’s also available on iOS, Symbian, Maemo and Windows Mobile devices.
We were surprised by the quality of its maps. On our 4in Samsung Galaxy S, they looked colourful and were easy to read, with the added bonus of 3D buildings in major towns and cities. In our road test, audio was clear and delivered in good time. The address and POI searches worked well, too.
We have reservations, though, and the first surrounds the live traffic service. You can add this for a reasonable £9 per country (or £18 for Europe), and it’s delivered via your phone’s data connection. However, this doesn’t provide information on how long delays are, and bringing up traffic data on your route is a laborious four-clicks from the main screen.
Route choices were mixed, too. It chose the M6 Toll on our Liverpool route, but not the Limehouse Link on our cross-London jaunt. It also made odd choices in our local tests.
Features are limited, with no live search and no way of planning multi-point routes. Neither is it very tolerant of a weak GPS signal. In our tests, Aura required a greater signal strength to gain a positional fix than either CoPilot or Navigon, so it’s one to avoid if your phone has marginal GPS reception.
The price is reasonable and includes free updates, but in the overall analysis we’d choose CoPilot or TomTom. Both are more reliable and have extra features, and CoPilot is far more tweakable.
