Windows Phone Thoughts: Finding Your Voice - iGuidance 4 Reviewed

Travelling with iGuidance
I found iGuidance to be responsive and informative. Routes are calculated quickly... routes from about 100 miles to 500 miles took just a few seconds. Recalculation is nearly instantaneous. The chosen routes seem to make sense and are of good quality.

There are 2 specific features that my favorite nav programs provide. I always look for those features in any new nav program that I review. So how did iGuidance do on the 2 point plan?

Advance warning: The best nav programs give you plenty of warning when turns are coming up. This is especially important at highway speeds, so that you have enough time to get in the proper lane. The best programs give you 1 1/2 to 2 miles of advance warning when traveling at 65 mph. A few give you a mile or less. iGuidance is one of the good ones... warnings come at about 2 miles in advance at highway speeds. Of course, the warning distance at lower speeds is appropriately shorter.

Volume control: All nav programs provide some means of controlling volume independently of system volume. Since you frequently need a higher volume for navigation to compensate for road and wind noise in a car, volume control within the nav program can spare you from having to fool with adjusting the volume every time you use the nav program, and then again every time you stop using it.

The best nav programs allow completely independent volume control within the program. The system setting has no bearing on the nav program setting and presents no restrictions. A much less useful version of this is what I call "semi-independent" volume control. Programs with this feature can change volume within the program independently, but the maximum volume is limited to the current system setting. The reason that this is much less useful is that you usually need higher volume with a nav program than with other uses of a Pocket PC, and if the maximum volume is limited by current system volume, you often must change the system volume anyway to make the nav program loud enough. Then when you're done with the nav program, you have to lower the system volume again.

Unfortunately, iGuidance seems to take the "semi-independent" route. This is something that I suggest they fix in a subsequent release.

Text-to-Speech Voice Prompts
As stated earlier, one of iGuidance's most touted features is its ability to include the names of streets in its voice instructions. So how well does this feature work?

Actually, pretty well, albeit with a few rough edges. I was impressed with the generally accurate pronunciations of street names. And it does make navigation somewhat easier, in that you don't have to look at the screen to see the name of the street for the next instruction.

A couple of rough spots in the implementation are indications that some further refinement is needed. First, the voice that does the stock phrases is very different from the voice that delivers the street names. The "stock phrase" voice is one of those soothing type computer voices that you hear in science fiction movies and TV. The "street name" voice is loud and strident, with the kind of voice and delivery that you'd expect from a truck stop waitress… you know, like in movies when the waitress yells "Adam and Eve on a raft - wreck 'em!" So the instructions would go something like this (italics = soothing stock phrase voice, bold italics = strident street name voice): In ½ mile, please exit to the right onto WI-83. You have to hear it to appreciate just how strange it sounds to have these 2 dramatically different voices giving you "tag team" instructions.

The second rough spot is the alarm that sounds when you're to execute a turn. Instead of a bell (such as OnCourse Navigator and Pharos use), the sound effect sounds strangely like a pipe being struck by a pipe wrench. It's best described as a clunk, and it rarely failed to evoke giggles in anyone who heard it. I searched through the menus and documentation to find if the sound could be changed, but I wasn't able to find the means by which to do it.

Conclusions
Overall, I would say that iGuidance is on a par with my other current favorite nav programs (OnCourse Navigator 6 and TomTom Navigator 6). It matches the others in most features and offers the text-to-speech capability that the other two lack. The lack of a fully independent volume control is a bit of a disappointment, and while the text-to-voice works well in general, it would benefit from a bit more polish. But if you're looking for a top performing nav program with all of the most critical features and more, iGuidance is well worthy of your consideration.

Doug Raeburn is a data architect specializing in data warehouse design. He lives in Pewaukee, Wisconsin, USA.