Bruno Silva

A little NDrive 3.1 review

Everyone that attended to the 4th Mobile Technologies Seminar by PocketPT.net won a free license of NDrive 3.1 for Pocket PC. So I left TomTom behind for a few days to try this Portuguese software. First of all I just love the user interface. The dark colors are great. In the menus you are able to scroll using your fingers, which is always nice.

The interface is pretty simple, which is normal since it has fewer functionality that TomTom. It doesn’t allow your to plan a trip and see it in images or to add pit stops to your navigation plan. But since I don’t plan pit stops very often, this isn’t a problem for me. And it has a demo version of the navigation when your GPS is off, and I am able to use to do some planning after all.

NDrive has a lot of Points of Interest (POIs) at least in the map of Portugal that I have. I really like the dynamic POIs that allow your to download information about the weather, traffic, events, pharmacies and speed cameras. I like that I don’t need to be online while driving to have access to this data. I can synchronize it before I leave home and head to my destination free of GPSR charge.

Another feature that amazed me was the amount of information about the POIs that is available. Below you can see information about Convento de Mafra (in Portuguese, thought). Address, description and even pictures. This software can be very useful if you are in some place which is not familiar to you and you want to choose a place to visit.

If you search for a restaurant, NDrive has not only the description and address but also phone numbers, e-mails and website. While reading these details you have a menu that allows you to browse to the website, call the restaurant or send the location information to a friend (ohh, and navigate to the restaurant, of course ).

Some POIs have 3D models that are shown in the map. It is nice, I don’t think that it is that useful, but it is a nice geeky feature.

The software is very responsive and easy to configure. The driving directions are great, just as TomTom. One thing that I noticed as a problem was the information about speed limits accuracy. The information available in my map almost always tells me that I can travel in a higher speed that I actually can. As a consequence the time that is shown to me as the estimated travel time is pretty wrong. Nevertheless I must say that I paid much more attention to this speed issue in NDrive than in TomTom, so this can be a common issue, who knows.

From now on I will use NDrive instead of TomTom. It fits my needs. Thanks for this software license, PocketPT.net and NDrive.