Sygic Drive 7.6 sat-nav software

Sygic Drive is a fairly new entrant in the sat-nav market, and its products are available for a range of platforms.

The quick-start manual is brief, but there is guidance built into the menus, with a series of guides to different aspects of the software – though it seems to have been written with touchscreens in mind, and lacks information about shortcut keys.

Although menu screens are clear, you sometimes need to work through several to find the option you want. And after we’d dismissed the quick guides when they appeared on first run, it took a while to find them again.

As well as postcode support, you can find locations on the map to navigate to, but we found this very fiddly, with poor control over the zoom level and a lack of detail at times. There’s a fairly good selection of points of interest, though.

Routing performance was pretty good on the whole, but with quirks – road numbers are read out, but not correctly. The A1199 was reported as just the A11, and after a while it seemed as if every road we were turning on to was the A112. Instructions were quite colloquial at times (‘Do a left at the roundabout’), but sometimes ambiguous, too; if a roundabout has exits at 10 and two o’clock, which one is ‘straight ahead’?

Re-routing was swift, and other good touches include the name of the road you’ll be turning into being highlighted on the map, as well as a specific volume setting for high speeds. Useful information available includes speed limits for every country, and a world clock, but traffic and safety camera information are apparently ‘coming soon’.

Sygic Drive does the job, but the overall impression is of a program that lacks polish.

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