ANS Navigation iPhone App

The business for satellite navigation isn’t massive in India, but it has been been on the rise. MapMyIndia and Garmin were amongst the first few names that generally springs up in your mind when you think of GPS devices. Lately, we had even reviewed the flagship from TomTom, which is Europe’s leading navigation device. However, with the growing number of smartphones, these companies have diverted to making apps as well. ANS Navigation is another such option that is now available, as this is one of the new devices in the market. To meet with the requirements, we pick up the ANS Navigation App for iPhone and find out how good it is.

ANS Navigation using NAVTEQ maps, which is why they are so detailed. NAVTEQ believes that to build navigation for India the direction guidance has to be unique from the rest of the world. In countries like USA, generally the guidelines are to “turn left from Block 5A and then head southwards.” However, for India the guidelines are, “ Head straight and turn left from the Ganpati temple, and proceed straight.” So, the guidelines are way different from Europe or the North American countries. That is how NAVTEQ works.

The ANS Navigation App costs Rs 1650/-  on the Apple Store and it has features like search for location by typing the name or through google search or even through POI. The number of options that this software provides is several. It is easy to use and also attention has been paid to every minute detail on the map. This is good but everything feels a bit too extra, and even the fact that it shows traffic is brilliant.

The ANS Navigation is smooth, however the files are extremely heavy, which means that it takes a while to load. We tried it on iPhone 4S, as still 5 is the latest offering in India with the latest iOS 7. We compared these maps to the freely available Google Maps. The difference in detailing is massive, but then the simplicity of Google makes it easier for non-techies to operate. Also, Google Maps take a bit lesser time to start and even the battery consumed is lesser.

We do not have stats for this, but after operating purely Google Maps we lost 28% battery, while with the ANS Navigation, with the same brightness and no apps running in the background the consumption was about 39%. So, there is a difference in the battery consumption too. But, that can be avoided as these maps are offline too. That is when the battery consumption was about 24%.

We like the ANS Navigation system, however all we want it to be a little bit more faster. We might try this application, on the new iPhone 5S sometime in the coming month and add some more facts in this story. The ANS Navigation will also be available on Android platform soon.