This weekend we burned through a couple of tanks of gas sightseeing the fall foliage on various scenic routes in CT and vicinity (thus doing our part in keeping the indian summer going for as long as possible). These trips gave me the opportunity to thoroughly test and use the GPS enabled navigation software that comes bundled with my new toy - the AT&T Tilt. It was a frustrating experience, which solidifies my impression that Telenav isn't worth paying for. I have doubts I'd rely on it even if it was free.

Ideally, I should spend some time putting some thoughts together in a coherent form, except for the fact that I don't believe that Telenav is worth spending any additional time on. From the mental logbook:

• No contacts integration. That means that I can not have Telenav drive to some address I have in the contacts. Telenav has its own contact/address book. I would have to input the address again and save it in Telenav before I can use it. Oh, there is an option to help with that - you can copy all or none of the contacts into Telenav. If you copy all, you will end up with a lot of entries in the Telenav's address book (and most of them without an actual address, because in my contacts 80% of the entries don't have an address associated. Yet Telenav copies them all. All 438 of them!). Telenav displays only four entries at a time, scrolling slowly one by one. Going to the end of the alphabet takes quite a while.
• Dependency on data access. Driving out in the more remote areas, where data access can be spotty, means that Telenav quits on you when you need it most. When it can not download maps, it draws a blue pathway through a white background, leaving it up to your imagination where the actual roads are. It is very slow to recover from a timed out data request - sometimes it took even 10 minutes to get it to receive maps again. Would it be too much to ask to have it download route and maps information in advance when it has access?
• No Cache. Telenav does not cache the road information. You can drive over and over through the same area and it will keep downloading maps, timing out on spotty access in slightly different places. Very much unlike Google's Mobile maps and Microsoft's Live Search.
• Poor interface. When zoomed in, Telenav prints the names of the streets between the thin black lines that draw the outline of a street. That is a very small 6pt (or thereabouts) black font on medium gray. If the phone sits on the dashboard in the car it's close to impossible to know that the street names are "provided", let alone read them for reference.
• Poor interface #2. I used quite a few GPS units over the time, and most had some sort of an "auto zoom" feature. When you take a turn, the map would zoom in to provide you with better feedback. After taking the turn, if the next step is "go 40 miles on I-95", the map would zoom out to give you a better perspective. A simple algorithm like making sure that the screen always displays the entire route between the current position and the next turn does the trick. As you approach the turn, the map zooms in. Others have more sophisticated algorithms to figure out what would be a good zoom ratio. No such luck with Telenav. There is no auto-zoom. Setting it manually means that the zoom factor is either too low or too high - never right. Constantly adjusting the zoom ratio on the screen while driving, and waiting for Telenav to re-download map tiles while taking a turn leaves one prone to throwing the damn thing out the window in a fit of rage.
• Traffic information is lacking. In theory Telenav supports routing around traffic bottlenecks. That was one of the advantages of being dependent on a data connection to provide routing assistance. One is - you get updated maps, latest and greatest all the time. The other is - you get traffic updates which allow Telenav to route you around traffic bottlenecks. After spending yesterday 1 hour in a traffic jam I am ready to stop believing in Telenav's traffic avoidance capability. The funny thing is, as the road just unclogged and we started moving at close to 65mph (legal speed limit, of course :-), Telenav caught wind of the traffic delay and changed the route from a fast flowing 65mph+ interstate to local 25mph roads littered with traffic lights. There is no way to tell Telenav not to do that without canceling the driving session, pulling over and fiddling with some obscure settings

The Telenav version I have been using is 5.2 - but during the trip it felt more like a piece of software that should have been versioned somewhere between 0.1 and 0.9. I am thinking of something nice to say about Telenav after two days of trying (sometimes desperately) to use it as a navigation tool. And the only thing I can come up with is: "it's a good thing the trial was free".