TeleNav GPS Navigator

by Antonio Wells Feb 21, 2009 11:23 AM – 12 Comments

Install

With TeleNav GPS Navigator you can get on-the-road access to full-color, 3D, turn-by-turn GPS navigation along with advanced speech recognition; traffic alerts with one-click re-routing; more than 10 million business listings; gas prices; weather updates and restaurant reviews.

Turn-by-turn driving directions by voice and onscreen.
Business Directory with more than 10 million points of interest
Full-color 3D maps nationwide
Audio traffic alerts and one-click re-routing
No more expensive 411 calls

TeleNav is the leader in cell phone GPS technology, and the first to develop GPS navigation for Google Android and for the G1.

Caution! Please do not drive and operate this app. Due to battery life limitations, we suggest using a car power adaptor and docking mount or car kit.

Check out the updated review on re-branded version called Scout

Price: Free, $69.99 Annual

AndroidTapp.com Android App Review:

Features:

TeleNav GPS Navigator is loaded with features, the main features are; Drive To, Search, Maps & Traffic, Tools & More. Gripe Alert: All these features come with a price $9.99 monthly subscription with TelevNav, atop of your required cellular data plan. Though TeleNav is offering a full 30 day free trial.

Drive to

Drive To offers the great value with:

3D moving maps in landscape and portrait mode
Name and address voice/speech recognition
Search businesses and route to the nearest location along the way
Automatic re-route if a turn is missed
Traffic alerts and one-click re-routing (it tells you exactly where the traffic starts along your route!)
Estimated Time of Arrival (ETA)

Search

Search allows you to find Businesses, Gas by price, Search along route, Restaurant ratings and reviews either by Typing it or Speaking It.

Maps and Traffic

Get various maps with the current Traffic for: Current location map, Business locations map, plus route summary views.

Tools & More

My Stuff contains your favorites, Recent Places you navigated and Commute Alerts
Weather loads forecasts wherever you specify; albeit current location, Recent Places, Air Port, etc.
Also located here are the Product Tour, Preferences and other information.

: TeleNav GPS Navigator Start Screen

: TeleNav GPS Navigator Home Screen

: TeleNav GPS Navigator in Motion

: TeleNav GPS Navigator Route Summary

: TeleNav GPS Navigator Traffic Summary

: TeleNav GPS Navigator Map Summary

: TeleNav GPS Navigator Drive To

: TeleNav GPS Navigator Maps

: TeleNav-GPS-Navigator-Drive-To-Airport-Search.jpg

: TeleNav GPS Navigator Type It

: TeleNav GPS Navigator Type It by Category

: TeleNav GPS Navigator Voice Search

: TeleNav GPS Navigator Tools and More

: TeleNav GPS Navigator Recent Places

: TeleNav GPS Navigator Weather

: TeleNav GPS Navigator Weather Forecast for the Week

: TeleNav GPS Navigator Create Commute Alert

: TeleNav GPS Navigator Commute Alerts

Usefulness:

For many people, a GPS navigator is very convenient. Whether short trips to non-frequented places, a long road trip or help if lost; it comes in handy. What makes TeleNav GPS Navigator more convenient is that it is on your T-Mobile G1 or Android powered cell phone. (Which can also be viewed as a con) It also automatically enables/disables your GPS, potentially conserving battery life.

Ease of Use:

TeleNav GPS Navigator operates just like any handheld GPS device.

Tips on Typing searches in TeleNav GPS Navigator:

Simply start typing part of a street, city or state and it automatically completes it.

Tips on Speaking searches in TeleNav GPS Navigator:

Hold the “Phone Answer” button on the T-Mobile G1 for the duration of your voice search.

Did you know in the Preferences menu you can change the defaults to better suit your GPS needs?

Change Route Style from Fastest (route to location) to; Shortest, Prefer Streets, Prefer Highway, Pedestrian, or have the app Ask you each trip. You can have it avoid HOV lanes, Tolls and Traffic Delays (if applicable). Lastly, you can configure other preferences like, 2D or 3D maps, backlight, traffic & roaming alerts.

Frequently Used:

Frequency of use is dependent on user needs. It is also a personal decisions to determine your cost-to-usage ratio in evaluating spending $9.99 monthly for the service.

Interface:

The user interface is awesome, easy to navigate, return to the home screen (simply tapp Menu), and optimized for thumb/finger navigation. The addition of voice/speech searching makes using the app easier. Lastly, when in use; the audible directions make it possible to use the app without looking at the screen.

AndroidTapp.com Rating

(4.3 out of 5)

Should you Download TeleNav GPS Navigator? Yes, take advantage of the 30 Day Trial!

Developer: TeleNav, Inc.

Tags: Android Apps, AndroidTapp.com App Review, cell phone GPS, gas prices, GPS, Maps, TeleNav GPS Navigator, TeleNav Turn by Turn GPS, Traffic and Maps, Voice Search

Categorised in: Productivity, Travel

12 Comments

By Michael Martin on February 22, 2009 at 9:05 am:

The $10/month charge on top of the data charge is a big detriment, especially since you can’t use this w/o a data connection.

Also having an onscreen keyboard would be helpful when voice commands aren’t doing the trick as flipping out the keyboard and driving could be adventurous.

I was excited about this app until these details emerged.

,Michael Martin
http://www.googleandblog.com/

Reply
By Purple Penguin on February 22, 2009 at 11:41 am:

$10 a month is enough to turn me away from this app.

I’d rather pay a higher purchase price than a monthly upkeep

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By Steve Potter on March 5, 2009 at 8:27 pm:

I have been trying it out for a few days now on my G1 and I am very impressed! Stop whining about $10/month–This will pay for itself in the appointments you won’t miss, or the raise you will get for being early to work. I have a very nice Magellan GPS to compare it to, and TeleNav is as good or even better in many ways. For Magellan’s traffic service, I had to $ubscribe. And it has lots of bugs that took two years for an update. TeleNav has “Feedback” buttons in the menus and you can leave VOICE feedback, that will keep it improving.

My biggest complaint is how long the G1 takes to find the satellites if GPS hasn’t been used recently. Usually ~15 min. I can’t blame TeleNav for that, but it does reduce its usefulness.

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By G1Nav on March 11, 2009 at 3:10 am:

If your phone lost GPS, the best way is reboot the phone, the phone itself has some problem with its GPS sometime.

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By let me be the one on March 23, 2009 at 6:02 pm:

no way i am gonna pay for this. other company s lets u play whit the GPS for free, why pay for this one

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By Tarpshack on April 14, 2009 at 8:55 am:

It works great so far. Directions have been accurate, voice commands are clear and speak road names, and voice input for destinations works well. This is exactly the application I wanted for GPS navigation on my G1.

I admit, the $10/month choked me up a bit at first. I have a Garmin GPS and have been looking for a second device for our other car. It seemed hard to justify paying a monthly fee for something I get for free on other devices. But I figured I’d at least give Telenav a try for the 30 day trial period and see how it works. I think I’m going to hang on to it for a while.

I have noticed some nice advantages of Telenav over a standard GPS device that might justify the cost for me:
- Portability (no extra devices to pack when traveling – which is when I use my GPS the most.)
- FREE automatic map updates (My Garmin has 2 year old maps on it because they’re not free.)
- FREE automatic updates on Points-of-Interest database (My Garmin’s POIs are updated with new maps. Old POI’s mean driving to closed and moved businesses. So I find myself always checking addresses on a secondary device for my destinations.)
- Traffic reports and rerouting included (monthly cost to add to Garmin for traffic info.)
- My G1′s contact list IS my address list. Address can be sent to Telenav by pressing the address associated with a contact (I no longer have to update my GPS address list separately.)

So when I thought about it, in order to get the functionality, convenience, and constant updates as I will with Telenav, I would have to spend money and time regularly on the upkeep of my stand-alone GPS device.

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By Alistair on May 5, 2009 at 5:47 am:

I suggest trying Andnav [http://www.andnav.org/] not available in the US yet, but works nicely and is free.

Makes use of open streetmap data so some areas are better covered than others.

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By Lady Di on July 15, 2009 at 7:50 pm:

I kinda like this app to a point. I was at the Home Depot and it was telling me to make a U-turn!?!? On the other hand, I needed to get to a theater in DC and it took me straight there. But… it would not find a super market that it gave me the complete address for?!?!

And so, it’s not better than V’s Navigator but I think I’ll keep it too.

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By Tarpsack on October 23, 2009 at 6:35 am:

I posted a somewhat glowing review above. I wanted to follow-up after some additional use. I ran into a couple minor issues that caused me to decide that the $10/month was not a worthwhile investment.

The biggest problem I ran across with TeleNav was the fact that I needed a data connection to get map data. This caused me some issues when I was in more remote areas with spotty service.

The link between navigation and my contacts was unreliable. When navigating to an address by clicking on one in my contacts list, sometimes the address that TeleNav used for navigation would not match the contact’s address at all. I could not figure out why this would happen.

There was also an issue with Telenav recognizing that I had a GPS position lock. Sometimes Telenav would continue to wait for a GPS signal (and timeout) after the GPS icon stopped blinking to indicate that a link was established. To fix, I would have to reboot my phone.

When it worked, it worked well. There were a couple of bugs that caused my wife to dread me even booting up Telenav for our navigation. Getting set-up occasionally seemed to take just too much time and effort, so I cancelled my subscription.

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By Collier42 on November 1, 2011 at 11:38 pm:

I just migrated to an HTC EVO 4G from a BB and I am having nothing but problems with this app. It seems as if the voice command function is not working even though I have saved the street names and directions option in the settings menu. I sense that this issue has got to do with my BT settings on my car radio as the voice command function doensn’t seem to work when the BT function is enabled on my radio. I have a Pioneer 6100BT radio in my car. Is there anyone out there that knows of a fix for this problem?

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- By Antonio Wells on November 3, 2011 at 7:20 am:
  
  When you’re in your car and paired, can you first play some music from your phone to the Pioneer 6100BT radio? If so, then go to your Settings » Wireless & network » Bluetooth settings » look for the paired radio and see if it says “Connected to phone and media audio”???
  
  Reply