5. Searching And Navigating With Ask GPS, Continued

Ask GPS warns you of upcoming turns and speaks street names as well as turn instructions, which is a feature usually reserved for dedicated GPS software, but you don’t get any estimates of your arrival time. It has unusually detailed freeway ramp directions, all the directions are very clear. When you make a correct turn, the software confirms you’ve got it right by saying "good," which may sound patronizing, but is actually comforting in a strange place. The directions tell you when you’re reaching your destination, including which side of the road to look for the address.

Using the GPS takes more battery, so it’s good to have the battery icon at the bottom of the map and the GPS indicator flashing on screen to let you know it’s on. To save battery life, Ask GPS only fires up the GPS radio when you search for something nearby or when you’re traveling on a route. You don’t notice any lag in the time it takes to get the location because it’s masked by the time you wait for the server. Usually this is only a few seconds and if you’re waiting more than 30 seconds you need to cancel the request and start again - unfortunately this loses the address you’ve chosen for directions. Reception is good, in a car or even several feet away from the window in a wooden house (although we did occasionally lose the signal indoors on a rainy night).

Problems can arise if you don’t follow the directions, either because you miss a turn or you don’t like the route. You can’t ask for an alternative route in advance and you have to wait for the app to notice that you haven’t made the turn, phone home and get an alternative route. If you’re driving through a large parking area or shopping mall, or you make a lot of turns quickly trying to get back on your route or you just take several wrong turns one after another, it often can’t retrieve the route quickly enough to catch up with where you actually are.

If a passenger is navigating, they can "fast forward" through the directions at any point by pressing left and right or flip between the turn and map view by pressing up and down. But if the software is requesting a new route from the server, you can’t move through the route to figure out how to get back on track. In the worst case, you have to pull over and wait for the server to create a new route, which is as almost as bad as having to pull over to look at a map. This scenario, fortunately, is rare. Usually, the worst that happens is that you get a flurry of confusing directions before you get a correct route

As with finding businesses and addresses, Ask GPS usually did an excellent job with directions but it got one navigation task very wrong. We asked for directions from our location San Jose to the Ferry Building, which is at the junction of Market and Embarcadero in San Francisco. Ask GPS found the Ferry Building and offered a route that took us farther into the city than we expected, and then announced that we’d arrived when we were nowhere near our destination. When we reviewed the directions by asking for the same intersection manually, the software asked if we meant the "City of San Francisco." It appears this was confirming the city we’d chosen but choosing the Map option, instead of clicking OK, revealed that because Market and Embarcadero don’t intersect at a navigable road junction, Ask GPS had defaulted to navigating to a standard address in San Francisco -in this case the Civic Center. There was no such confirmation when we looked for the Ferry Building instead of the address, so we never had the chance to see that the physical address wasn’t something the system could find a route to. Ask representatives said the firm is looking into the problem.