A few months ago I signed up to Waze, but never used it and didn't really look into it. But recently, I've seen a few articles about it and am keen to give it another go.

We have a TomTom Golive SatNav, which is pretty good in a vanilla kind of way. However, we can't justify the cost of either the map updates or the live traffic subscription, so our maps and help are getting further out of date.

What do you reckon?

I use Waze.

As long as you turn off as many of the advertising and group options as possible (as they get a bit distracting), I find it extremely good.

It has never let me down or taken me to a wrong place, is accurate, and easy to use. The various live warnings it gives on obstructions, traffic slow downs and so on have been extremely handy at times. It does all the 'via the stereo' things as well if you have it linked to your car set up.

Fading phone coverage doesnt seem to upset it either. It seems to predict route and time and still be accurate unless there is zero coverage for a while.

Overall I would say its good.

Here Maps is free, zero adverts and you can download maps to device. What's not to like?

People need to beware any Microsoft windows phone 10 upgrade. HERE Maps (Jointly Owned by several car manufacturers) has ended their deal with Microsoft. Here maps in windows 10 will be very much limited but they have agreed to continue windows 8 support, for now.

We are talking iPhone or Android here Bob. The here announcement and the fact that my Lumia1020 was taken off the windows 10 update list being reasons to leave the windows phone arena

I favour the Navigator app with free maps for Android: no data loads on the run. Doesn't do live traffic though (I think it might if you pay for the TomTom maps).

Main reason for selecting it was the ability to introduce waypoints, though you have to remember to take them out again when you plot a new route. Also the cost was a huge driver, for something I use only rarely and usually when on the continent.

I've generally been very happy with the TomTom, but the business model of charging £50-odd for map updates plus the same again for live traffic info is unsustainable.
It's mainly the live traffic I'm interested in, it was pretty handy when we had it.

Here uses up to date Navtech maps and their maps are free and frequently updated. Also live traffic included.

I use copilot which is good but not free. Not paid for any map updates but you do have to pay for traffic but only £8 a year i think.

Might have a look at waze but as with other i like the maps downloaded.

Why don't people use Google maps? I've never found anything better.

Imagine what happens to your data costs using Google maps between here and, say, northern Norway...

A satnag system that requires online connectivity is by any sane measure broken.

We keep an old Nokia N8 for sat nav duties abroad and it's still fine although I don't think that situation will last forever. RIP Symbian.

Ok this is what Gill and I do when traveling all over the world. We buy a road map for the country we are in and navigate by reading it. Then when we need to navigate a city we use our tom tom sat nav.(sometimes)

Our we doing it wrong?

Wasn't the Nokia maps tech all handed over to become Here, so it's effectively the same thing??

Oh, you old-school devils!

I stopped doing this when I got fed up with lots of dog-eared, muddy-boot-stained, pages-missing road atlases accumulating in the car/house/wherever you need it not to be.

We only got a SatNav when MrsC had a job photographing expensive properties in unfindably-remote places around Suffolk/Essex/Cambridgeshire. Before that we hardly ever went anywhere I didn't know, so it wasn't a problem.

After our move to Spain and back to an area of the UK I don't know, the TomTom has become a pretty useful bit of kit.

Yup -paper maps had their place but I remember trying to find a specific hotel in (IIRC) Lyon. I had two maps - one that showed the 1-way system but the hotel was right at the edge of the page and the other that had the hotel in the middle but no 1-way system marked. Reading them off my lap whilst driving a hire car in city traffic was rather stressful and frustrating.

The trick is to try not to become reliant on the Sat Nav else you never learn the routes. Paper maps never give great traffic data either I've found.

Lots of friends that have driven from the uk to my place using just a sat nav and not even having a road map of France in the car.
When they arrive I ask what way they came and am astounded which way that some sat nav' stake you.

One pal stuck in the name of my local town then just followed the instructions,he ended up somewhere in Normandy with the same name.
And this is a guy that's driven here before that.

Sat nav has its uses but I think a mixture of the both is a must when in a strange area.

Apparently so, useful information that thanks.

With regards to old school navigation techniques I often use a bit of both methods, just resorting to sat nav near the destination. I've never had a dedicated sat nav but just used the app that I had on my mobile phone so it has never cost anything other other than the odd air vent mounting bracket. It's still many years since I've possessed any form of road map though, I just print out the long range part of the route with major towns and roads as a helper until I'm close.

The trouble with maps is as mentioned you either need to balance them in your lap or pull over to have a look which I am always loathed to do on long journeys. I also have an issue in that my passenger seat map reading device does not have the facility to translate current road position to a position on a map. This in turn hampers the AI function which predicts which turn should be taken next and causes more stress than it's worth most of the time. One pre sat-nav family holiday in France had me following the setting sun until we hit the coast then stopping to work out whether we needed to go north or south from there. Now that's old school!

I don't tend to go places that I don't know the way to really.
The only thing I use satnav for is to make sure I can beat the "expected arrival time" number.....

I'm a Waze user too, I like it.
I use Waze regularly when travelling the country.

I gave it a quick try this morning on a short trip of 20-odd miles. It seems pretty good in a SatNav kind of way, though I'd rather it told me distances in yards not feet. I couldn't work out if it was interrupting the radio with instructions, but it certainly did work through the stereo speakers, which was good.

I'll persevere with it, I think, as long as I can charge the phone at the same time, as it seems to be a bit of a power vampire.

I've been using it a short while after several people at work were raving about it. It's quite a good SatNav where you can also overlay a little GPS speedo, and when setting up a route it does suggest 3 options that you can look at on a (faded out) map. But for anything over 20 miles it can he hard to see which roads it's taking you along, and you might not want too many B roads for example.

Whilst it is good for showing reports from other users on the road ahead (roadworks, traffic jams, cars stopped on the hard shoulder, etc.) the little icons it displays (for problems ahead, but also other users, and "bonus" icons like we're playing a game can soon clutter up the display making it hard to see the route ahead very clearly, especially in 3D mode (it might be better to only show the icons on the route itself and not on all nearby roads) and once or twice I have missed a turning having been unable to see clearly enough where the exit was.

It seems to use these user reports (or maybe tracks users via their GPS?) to assign an average speed to some sections of road which it then colours orange or red for example, but sometimes these classifications linger long after whatever the problem that caused the delay has cleared.

What's disappointing is that whilst it can show traffic en route and estimate journey times over 3 different routes at the start, it does seem to periodically re-asses whether the current route is the best. When heading into a delay, a warning flashes up very briefly, hardly long enough to see what it is and where it is.

Like any SatNav, it will pick one route over another just to save 0.0000001 of a second of journey time. And then when you ignore it, it will show a still longer journey time (due to doing a U turn) but then it will re-route with a shorter duration. Compared to Navigation/Google Maps the directions are better, the exit number indicator for roundabouts is much better. I typically check the traffic on Google Maps before my commute to/from work, and select a route accordingly. Going back to Google Maps you get a much simpler "map only" display without all those irritating icons.

Either are useful in their own way, but still reliant on a data connection of course. But if I'm going anywhere "new" I like to take a good old-fashioned paper map to get a feel for the places and roads and possible routes beforehand.

Good stuff guys - having read the above posts and looked online at the various options, I think i'll persevere with 2 versions; HERE because of the very useful offline navigation, and Google maps for it's excellent detail.

When I looked at Waze it didn't seem to offer what I look for in navigation - maybe once the "live" situations are actually live I may reconsider

Waze is owned by Google, so when you look on Google maps and seen there has been an accident, that info has been reported from Waze.

Google maps you can download offline sections for use when you have no connection / abroad.

Another Waze user here. Used it daily on the commute and got quite high on the scoring. Haven't used it for ages, due to not having a phone mount in any of the cars

You can download individual blocks, but they're not very big, and you have remember to do it beforehand.

Leading on from this...

Are all smartphone mounts created equal? Or are some much better than others?

Ideally, I'd like one with the ability to charge whatever phone was in it, assuming you can get universal ones, rather than one for every phone?

TBH I stopped using them a couple of years ago, certainly some hold the phone better than others but the specific car's vent design affects this too. Nowadays I just use a case that sits the phone sideways on and angles it upwards then sit the thing in the instrument binnacle.

I've tended to go for the proper "active" mount, buying off eBay just like the phones themselves. Got a fixed Brodit and a windscreen Samsung mount in the Coupe (for the same phone) a bit of overkill perhaps but then the wife or kids can charge their phones too

I'm on 3 so I get free international data everywhere I need to travel.

I'm not at all keen on the CD or air-vent mounts. Our TomTom uses a windscreen sucker and it's been virtually flawless in UK winter and Spanish summer. I'd prefer to stick with that type.