Test Driving TeleNav Navigator On The T-Mobile G1

This morning TeleNav announced that its 3D turn-by-turn navigation software would be available for all Android devices starting on February 24th. Since “Android devices” pretty much means just the the G1 right now, we went ahead and downloaded a beta version and took it for a test run.

If you’re familiar with TeleNav (or if you’ve ever used the GPS software on an AT&T, Sprint, or T-Mobile phone) then you’ll feel right at home. You can easily search for points of interest (there’s 10 million) or an address using the keypad or your voice.

There’s just one catch to the voice search: it didn’t work in our tests. We tried “Long Beach, New York,” and “Bethlehem, Pennsylvania,” even “Kansas City, Kansas” and “New York, New York.” Nothing worked. Our version was a pre-release Beta and hopefully these kinks are worked out shortly. In the end, we decided to type the address in, and the G1 routed us from a local train station to our home in under 20 seconds. When it starts to route, it checks the traffic conditions. It stopped us directly outside our house when we were finished.

Interacting with TeleNav on the G1’s large display was a pleasure. It felt a lot like typing in directions into an actual in-car personal navigation device, but we do wish that there was some way to leave the software in horizontal mode with the keyboard closed. This is where an on-screen keyboard will really shine on future Android devices.

The software will be available on February 24th from TeleNav.com, and it will be available in the Android store in the future. The price for the over-the-air download has not been announced.