foxNav 1.4 review

FoxNav – an app for Android-based smartphones – is something of an oddity. It includes touches of brilliance and innovation, yet in places it looks a touch half-baked.

Take the main menu, for example. It looks fine with the phone in landscape mode, but flick it into portrait and some descriptive text is truncated, showing things such as “Safety Cam…”. It’s the kind of silliness you expect to see in freeware, not commercial software.

We also found the navigation display confusing, and a couple of times the application popped up whole screens of text for us to read and acknowledge, mid-journey. This is both distracting and potentially dangerous.

Yet foxNav also provides neat features such as being able to upload your list of favourite places via a web portal, saving fiddly text entry on the phone. The website also neatly logs any routes you’ve planned.

The app uses off-board routing, connecting to Jentro’s servers to calculate the steps of your journey and the relevant maps. It’s intolerant of the slightest deviation, though,

and will spend ages trying to get you back on to the original route, even when a different one would be optimal.

It's undeniably cheap, but with CoPilot Live 8 also available on the Android platform, we’d suggest that as a better option than foxNav.

Author: Paul Ockenden