South Africans can now access TomTom navigation from their Android smartphones for free.
The new TomTom GO Android app, unveiled last week, is free to download and offers drivers 75km free navigation each month. Users can pay R249.99 for a year's unlimited navigation thereafter. Three years' subscription is R549.99.
The app offers real-time traffic updates which allow users to see where a traffic jam starts and ends; what kind of traffic it is; and a to-the-minute estimated time of arrival, taking the traffic into account. The app also warns users of upcoming speed cameras.
The app stores its maps on the user's smartphone, so users do not need an Internet connection or data roaming to use it, although traffic updates rely on online information. The app also features a global map licence so it is usable in 111 countries.
The new app is a replacement of the old TomTom GO app. "We entirely rethought our mobile solution," says Corinne Vigreux, MD of TomTom Consumer. "The old app consisted of many different apps with different map cuts. Instead of having to update all these different apps, we decided to switch to one app that has been rebuilt from the ground up," a company spokesperson explained.
TomTom will eventually pull support for its old app, but as of yet has not specified a cut-off date. For the moment, users of the old TomTom GO app can purchase a three-year subscription to the new app for R10.
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