Tomtom GPS South East Asia apps on iOS

Women ask for directions, Men read a map! I prefer GPS!

Jakarta is a very complicated city when it comes to driving. From a stressful traffic, polluted air and a confusing roads. I live in East Jakarta almost 26 years and in Perth for 4, I know Perth a lot better than West and North Jakarta. Jakarta is big, messy and crowded, yet I can’t explain why I love it so much. It was build without proper planning and it getting messier each day. Those reasons led me to GPS.

GPS, stands for Global Positioning System, is a device to basically tells you where you should go, which road to take, to avoid, which way is fastest, shortest, cheapest! Well, some can do that, if you must know. GPS works through satellites. It sends signal to the sky, not to God, and matches it with the maps it has installed. These maps have these huge database of road names, point of interest, your home, your office, etc.

But nowadays, finding a GPS is also not an easy task to do. It’s like buying a mobile phone, too many options. Especially when you walk around a mall, and you found these shops that sells office supplies, also sells GPS devices, that little tempting things that sticks to your windshield, and hey, it talks! Some people would go online to hunt these babies as well. Their price ranges from a million Rupiah up to three, depends on its brand, maps database & features (software).

I love gadgets, but I try my best to minimize the amount of gadgets I have. I don’t wanna be carrying 2 phones, a tablet, their chargers and adding 1 more, an oversized, bulky GPS device. I love it when my gadgets are good for several things, who says only women can multitask? Ha! My iPhone is my phone/organizer/camera/voice-recorder/note/games/music all in 1 gadget. I want to add 1 more important feature in it, GPS. That would be perfect.

I have a friend that has a TomTom GPS Go 2050. I played around with it for a while and I thought that it was awesome, and my first thinking went straight to the AppStore hoping for it to be available for my iPhone, and it did! When I search for “Tomtom”, it came out with 6 choices of apps: 5 of them are Tomtom GPS with 5 different choices of maps (Hong Kong, US & Canada, Australia, Western Europe and South East Asia) and 1 is for car kit tool. Figured I live in Indonesia and travel to Singapore once in a while, so I downloaded the South East Asia map which covers Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand & Brunei.

This app has just the features I needed. Allow me to break it down to the several features I like:

• Intersections: Tomtom automatically change the layout every time I meet a big intersections and showing it clearly which one to take. With this kind of screen layout, its like the app is saying “I don’t know what else to show you if you still lost, dumbo”

     

• Voice assistant that you can change and even in English, it has several accents (UK, America, Australian & Irish). I chose Australian considering I’m half Oz (Yeah, right) Unfortunately, it does not have Bahasa Indonesia though, neither in the voice, nor instructions 

     

• Sharing. These days, people share everything on Facebook, Twitter. So why don’t we share our location using GPS? This App? Go the distance by sharing your ROUTE!! Look what I shared! 

IQ Routes technology. -so what they’ve name it- basically Tomtom just does everything when planning a route.

• Choosing between the shortest, fastest and even the cheapest route by avoiding toll road.
• It also remembers your history and record our most used routes and recommends it.
• Reroute your route if you like to avoid several roads. For example, we are avoiding 3 in 1 on certain time of the day.
• Determining route and re-route should we took the wrong way… FAST! (Depends on the processor of your iPhone. I’m using 4S.. sooo.. yeah!)
• Advance planning. It allows us to plan your route ahead and set timing when we wanna depart and when we wanna arrive and it can remind you with the built in alarm on your iPhone!

-       Navigate to contacts or pictures! This is way cool! Navigate to contacts works well if we have an address written in that particular contact. Navigate to photo works if you enabled location service in your Camera app, so every time you take a picture, iPhone automatically geotag that location so then we can use it as a GPS destination! How cool is that?

Some ask "why don't we use the maps built in for iPhone?" (Google maps) Answers: 

1. the maps is more complete in Tomtom of course
2.  It don't need an internet connection, the map is installed within the iPhone

-       It’s just built for iPhone! Name it, multitasking meaning.. with your GPS guiding your way, you can make a call, reads a text (don’t reply while driving though) and listen to music.

It does have some drawbacks though:

• It has Indonesia Map but not the Bahasa, in terms of voice assistant nor instructions.
• It actually has features like avoiding traffic & speed camera. Speed camera, we don’t have that in Indo, but avoiding traffic could be verrrrrryyyyyy useful here, but its just isn’t available yet. But hey, where in Jakarta is free of traffic jam?
• Expensive! I bought mine for $70. Not the cheapest around, you need to spend quite a lot for those rich features.

All in all, if you have the money to spend, it’s a very recommended app! I couldn’t recommend anything else. If you have an iPad, you don’t have to pay for it twice, that price actually goes for both. When money is the problem, think about it this way, it’s cheaper than buying the full sized GPS device. Or, consider this, look what I’ve done! Tadaaaa!