Sunday, April 29, 2007

Nokia Smart2Go - not too smart ??

I loaded up the Nokia Smart2Go service on my E50 a few days ago. This is a mapping service (vaguely similar to Google maps on the Blackberry) which also does routeplanning and (for an extra charge) navigation. You can use it standalone or connect it to a bluetooth GPS receiver.

I downloaded the Irish & Brittany maps and had a prowl through them. The French one had our holiday spot so passed muster. The Irish one had the newly opened Ennis ByPass and the Fermoy ByPass which is quite impressive.

So I did a quick routeplan from Home to Ennis. Routeplanning was quick enough, it will present decent maps to look at (small screen though). However it had a fatal flaw - coming in from the Southern Road instead of turning left onto South Terrace it had a right turn (against the traffic) follwoed by a drive up by the Jehovah's and then onto the South Link Road. Problem is that (a) you can't go right there and (b) that road leads to a footbridge over the South Link. So "Nul points" there. I checked the mapping and its by both Navteq (best Irish maps) and TeleAtlas (poor Irish maps) and that led me to another thought...

I used have a Navman SatNav with TeleAtlas maps which missed out a lot of teh roads around Passage West etc. It also suggested the old railway line from Rochestown Road to Skehard Road as a viable route in the car. I reported this error to TeleAtlas at the time but guess what they still show it as a viable route. So it looks like they got Navteq maps to expand coverage (Passage West) but kept the base TeleAtlas routing.

IT's a pity because overall the product is nice but does show that just because the satnav says "Turn Right" doesn't mean you should blindly obey it.

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