Ok, until it crashes

Unfortunately, this appears to be the only turn-by-turn routing game in town when it comes to a GPS device for Japan. On the plus side, the maps seem accurate, and the controls are in English.

On the downside...
1) The app crashes. A lot. It crashes on a 3GS iPhone. It crashes on a third-gen iPad, and it crashes on a iPhone 4. Saving favorites is one way to make it crash (about every third time).

2) Yesterday, while I was driving, it crashed and wouldnt restart. Neither killing the app nor restarting the phone brought it back. So that was fun. I had to delete it from my phone and then redownload it when I got back to the hotels wireless, which for a 2-GB app took all night. Yay. And then all my favorites were, of course, lost.

3) Good luck trying to use a lat/long. I finally figured out that you can google search a lat long from within the app, then save it as a favorite. But if you ever try to view that favorite on a map...the app crashes.

4) If you try to save a location thats not close to a street (eg, on a military base, which the app knows nothing about) to the favorites, you wont actually be able to ever get it to navigate to it. Itll just crash.

5) The app is poorly coded. Occasionally, itll just start drawing big brown flashing polygons over the display, obliterating the map. Great fun when youre driving! Also, you can tell whoever wrote it made a bunch of errors when coding array sizes, as if you bring up a list of POIs or something that have English in them, then scroll down in the list, and then back up, all the English will have vanished, and the list is now entirely in Japanese.

I really cant recommend this app. What I can recommend is that its sellers be arrested and charged with fraud for selling such a shoddy product for $50. Youd be better off with any of the free apps that use OpenStreet map data and just learn to live with it not calculating routes for you. Just use the maps app on your iPhone. Im going to look into getting a refund for this, but Im not hopeful. An app that becomes unusable while youre using it to navigate is a safety hazard. It would be great if the creators would step up, do the right thing, and refund the ridiculous purchase price to anyone who has bought it, but you know thatll never happen. If they dont care enough to produce an app that works, they wont care enough to take care of their customers.

Gussie Fink-Nottle about Gogo Navigator - JAPAN