CITY: (not only) virtual travels in real cities

And again a female look :)

For the May holidays, many of you have already bought tickets to warm places and interesting cities. In order not to get lost in an unfamiliar place, the advice is obvious: install the navigation application on your smartphone or tablet. And if you want to "visit" a new place before the trip - put PROGOROD. In it, you can lay a route almost throughout Europe, including resort areas, and navigate the area, watching the virtual machine that passes by three-dimensional buildings.
Beautiful Prague with unusual architecture, green spring Berlin, never-sleeping seaside Barcelona - you will go to any of these cities with ready-made routes and you will not lose precious time studying paper cards purchased at the airport. Tuscany, Protaras, the southern coast of Crimea will turn from a set of letters into real coastal zones, which you can ride with a breeze, as if you celebrate Victory Day there every year.
Yes, the May holidays evoke thoughts about traveling, but, unfortunately, I can’t get around Europe. However, I plan to do it in August. And I was puzzled by what cards I will use. And here is the CITY with updated foreign maps! I tested it on two Android devices: the Highscreen Explosion smartphone (Samsung Galaxy SIII's stepbrother) and the Lexand STA-7.0 navigator (just a good GPS explorer), and I can tell you something.

Installation and setup

Trial versions of programs, as a rule, are either “circumcised” functionally, or work for several days. PROGOROD was generous for a month of using all the features and cards, hoping that you would stick to it and pay 950 rubles for the version for Android and 1,129 for iOS. There is no need to perceive this discrimination on the basis of materiality: the license is valid for five “apple” devices at once. In other cases, only one. If you have lost a smartphone or tablet, you can write to the developers and ask to transfer the license to another gadget with an explanation of the reasons. It turns out, if you download the application right now, you can just appreciate it during a trip to the May holidays.
For Android devices PROGOROD is downloaded from Google Play. Well, if your device does not support the main store - on the site pro-gorod.ru there is a link to the archive, and the program can be installed bypassing restrictions.
The application menu is extensive and at the same time quite understandable.




Keep in mind that PROGOROD requires installing cards only in the device’s memory, and no arguments about the lack of free space can convince him. I tried to cheat by rearranging the application itself on a microSD card, but it continued to insist on using the main storage. And there, in the memory of the Lexand STA-7.0 navigator, there was no place even for a modest map of the Far East. Well, I had to temporarily rewrite the competitor's cards on the external hard drive and free up the necessary megabytes. Phew ...

The list of maps from Open Street includes Austria, Bulgaria, my beloved Germany, Spain, Italy, Cyprus, Poland, Turkey, Finland, the Czech Republic, Switzerland, the Baltic states, as well as the USA and some CIS countries (Belarus, Kazakhstan, Moldova, Ukraine). The map of Russia can be downloaded both as a whole and by federal districts so that it does not take up too much space. It's nice that for most operations you do not need to connect to the Internet, it is useful only for downloading other maps, updates and getting information about accidents and traffic jams.

How does it work

When you first start the application will remind you that they do not need to use while driving. And rightly so - there is nothing to be distracted from the road, because it is dangerous. In the case of PROGOROD, one does not need to risk health and karma: he has outlined the route and go, listening to the prompts.


It’s easy to build a route. Choose a starting point, put a green flag there from the menu that appears, and at the end of the path - the checkered finish. The program will choose the best route, calculate the distance and time.
Then the fun begins - the journey of a virtual machine. She is driving her route in real time with voice prompts. I didn’t take her along the Moscow streets — it would be too simple — I sent her to Europe. Still, the vacation season is on the nose, will navigation cope?
I open the map of Spain and note with pleasure that the Canary Islands are also included in it. And there, by the way, it is warm all year round and you can swim. Eh, dreams of dreams ... So I immediately “went” to Tenerife, where I was going in May, but because of some circumstances it didn’t work out. The virtual machine was racing fast along the beautiful TF-1 motorway, and it seemed as though I was driving along a familiar route from the Las Americas resort to the island's capital, Santa Cruz de Tenerife.



The route to Highscreen Explosion (vertically) and Lexand STA-7.0

The road is drawn in detail, and if you "go ahead", different options for approaching the end point will be shown.




Such a make-believe trip is a great idea for those who travel to an unfamiliar country and want to conduct reconnaissance on the ground. Three-dimensional display of buildings in large cities will also help to navigate, the pictures are close to reality. Of course, it’s better to live in admiring the Coliseum or Gaudi’s architectural masterpieces live (and the May holidays are a great occasion, they’re still not +40 everywhere, but not +10 already), but it won’t hurt to know in advance where they are located. But if you have not decided on the trip, I advise you, after reading this review, to rush to the travel agency or book tickets yourself, otherwise it won’t be!
The smartphone handled the application a little better than the navigator - thanks to a more powerful processor (four cores and 1.4 GHz versus one core and one GHz) and a gigabyte of RAM, which the navigator has half as much. However, when used in a real car, this difference will be imperceptible: you will not start in a split second after plotting a route! And it’s even more convenient to look at a 7-inch screen from a driver’s seat than at 4.7 inches - a fact.

Bonus features

The CITY application is useful not only on a trip, but also at home. It is always up to date with Moscow traffic jams, and in my opinion it builds detour routes abruptly Yandex, focusing on the recommended speed, history of road events, the real situation and forecast.
From the map you can find out not only about traffic jams, but also about incidents, road works and other events.




It is clear that even the most advanced program will not be able to keep track of everything that is happening. To report on accidents, repairs and other troubles, there are "geoblogs": you can put your tag in the right place and discuss strangers. By the way, a fun feature of the program is that when you enter a toponym (city, street name, etc.), it leaves only those letters highlighted on the virtual keyboard that can continue the query. This is convenient - even with long nails, you won’t be able to miss and enter the wrong name.
Useful trick - radar information. The application can report them per kilometer, 700 or 300 meters, and you will have time to slow down if you overshot it exceeded. And also, when you are driving on a highway where the speed, for example, should be no more than 80, and you have accelerated to 90, the program will squeak that you have exceeded the speed. This function pleased me the most on the road :)


Another interesting function is “Augmented Reality”. If you turn on the camera of a smartphone or navigator so that the road is visible, PROGOROD will impose on it the location of gas stations, cafes and other useful objects with an indication of the distance to them. Very comfortably!


In the “Tracking Settings”, you can specify the increase in the map as you approach complex interchanges.


And if you also use the “Correct Decision” service, the chances of driving in the wrong lane and turning in the wrong direction will be minimized. Finally, you can choose the quality of the road surface, and then your light city car will not go on the dirt road, and the all-wheel drive SUV will not stand instead of everyone on a good but busy road.

Minuses

Maps are not updated daily, and for some users this "tragic circumstance" greatly spoils the mood. However, there is not a single service where the latest versions of maps would always be. I remember my house appeared on Yandex maps a year (!) After construction, and on others - even later. Various mini-updates, such as information about blocking roads or changing directions on them, "Progorod" receives daily.

The second minus is that when switching between cards, the application is overloaded. It takes 10-15 seconds, which in principle is not long, but some users are dissatisfied.

Finally, the foreign audience does not like that PROGOROD is primarily aimed at Russian-speaking users. Yes, there is English in the settings, but voice prompts and many Russian names are only in Russian.

conclusions

The CITY is extremely convenient on trips and even in front of them: you can drive through unfamiliar terrain in advance to evaluate the trip time and upcoming maneuvers. An application rarely needs Internet access, which in roaming conditions is a big advantage!
In your hometown, the program is also useful. Traffic jams, radars, accidents - nothing will be hidden from the gaze of PROGOROD and its users. As a result, the trip will become more comfortable and faster. But the speed, of course, should not be exceeded anyway, even if all ambushes of the traffic police are displayed on the map.
And yet ... don’t forget to buckle up! And run already to book hotels if you haven’t! :)

PS If you missed something, clumsily issued - kick. I will fix it :)