This week TomTom, the makers of stand-alone navigation devices for vehicles, announced that it has released a Navigation app for the Android platform – with a couple of catches.
The TomTom app has been available for a while on the iOS platform for $50, which seems steep, but is understandable on a platform that, until recently, lacked a built-in navigation feature. The Android version of TomTom is also $50. On a platform that often comes with Google’s excellent navigation app pre-installed. While the TomTom app does offer offline navigation, on devices with a data connection a situation where data would not be available and navigation would be important seems (intuitively at least) rare.
The new Android app also only works on Android devices with resolutions of 800 x 480 or 854 x 480. This excludes many newer Android smartphones, such as the Samsung Galaxy S III, HTC One X, and Galaxy Nexus. The company stated that it is “committed to supporting higher resolutions on an ongoing basis,” but did not say when newer devices would get the app.
“TomTom has a history of making great navigation applications,” said Corinne Vigreux, managing director for TomTom’s Consumer division. “Our existing iPhone app gets fantastic customer feedback and regularly wins awards. Today, we are bringing this world-class navigation experience to millions of Android smartphone users for the first time.”
For the record, TomTom’s current iPhone app has a 2.5-star rating, with user reviews complaining heavily about the app’s new forced Facebook integration.