Google's search and POI database are certainly superior to Navigate. Navigate's POI search uses Tomtom data and it's simply not as good as Google in that respect. Also Navigate relies on fairly infrequent mapping updates from Tomtom where as Google's map corrections are live within a few weeks (Tomtom's own app also suffers in this respect).
It's horses for courses. If I want to search for a place with which I am not familiar and be taken directly to the car park or front door Google is more suitable (actually I'd use Navigon but that also incorporates Google search and POIs). For a traffic avoicance tool, including familiar places, I'd use Navigate.
The difference in Naivgate's favour is in the fine detail of the routing. Google retains a preference for main roads and will practcally never deviate onto side roads to get around traffic until you're close to your destination. It essentially gets fairly coarse route options from Google's servers and will not deviate from those options even if all options have traffic (although it will re-route if it detects a faster route among its coarse options). By comparison, Navigate gives you an entirely bespoke fastest route, based on current dynamic traffic conditions. If all the usual routes have traffic it still finds a route that weaves in, out, through and past them, only placing you in the thick of it if there is really an unavoidable bottleneck. For the difference to be apparrent to the average user, the traffic **** has to hit the fan though. Navigate does for me what Waze promised, but has so far failed to do, providing the best routes through congested areas with which I am familiar. It surpasses what I can do with local knowledge. Tomtom's own app already did this considerably better than Google, while generally using a similar route options based approach.
Navigate takes the same Tomtom data, but takes advantage of the computing power of current smartphones to give routing with unrivalled precision. That's not to say Google couldn't do this in future. A working combination of Waze's routing engine and reported incidents with Google's traffic flow data might achieve this. It seems that Google are treading carefully around anti-trust applications, otherwise they have the technology and data available to match Navigate's routing.
The other thing that would vastly improve Waze, Google Nav, Tomtom and Navigate is full incorporation of Elgin's www.roadworks.org portal data. This has info on local roadworks including closures from the vast majority of UK local authorities. Google already has some agreement with Elgin (they supply them their traffic flow data) but Elgin's roadworks info hasn't made it into a smaptphone navigation product AFAIK. It is shown in Inrix's traffic app but this doesn't include turn by turn navigation.
It's horses for courses. If I want to search for a place with which I am not familiar and be taken directly to the car park or front door Google is more suitable (actually I'd use Navigon but that also incorporates Google search and POIs). For a traffic avoicance tool, including familiar places, I'd use Navigate.
The difference in Naivgate's favour is in the fine detail of the routing. Google retains a preference for main roads and will practcally never deviate onto side roads to get around traffic until you're close to your destination. It essentially gets fairly coarse route options from Google's servers and will not deviate from those options even if all options have traffic (although it will re-route if it detects a faster route among its coarse options). By comparison, Navigate gives you an entirely bespoke fastest route, based on current dynamic traffic conditions. If all the usual routes have traffic it still finds a route that weaves in, out, through and past them, only placing you in the thick of it if there is really an unavoidable bottleneck. For the difference to be apparrent to the average user, the traffic **** has to hit the fan though. Navigate does for me what Waze promised, but has so far failed to do, providing the best routes through congested areas with which I am familiar. It surpasses what I can do with local knowledge. Tomtom's own app already did this considerably better than Google, while generally using a similar route options based approach.
Navigate takes the same Tomtom data, but takes advantage of the computing power of current smartphones to give routing with unrivalled precision. That's not to say Google couldn't do this in future. A working combination of Waze's routing engine and reported incidents with Google's traffic flow data might achieve this. It seems that Google are treading carefully around anti-trust applications, otherwise they have the technology and data available to match Navigate's routing.
The other thing that would vastly improve Waze, Google Nav, Tomtom and Navigate is full incorporation of Elgin's www.roadworks.org portal data. This has info on local roadworks including closures from the vast majority of UK local authorities. Google already has some agreement with Elgin (they supply them their traffic flow data) but Elgin's roadworks info hasn't made it into a smaptphone navigation product AFAIK. It is shown in Inrix's traffic app but this doesn't include turn by turn navigation.
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