Nokia Drive on the Nokia Lumia 800 is excellent for helping you to get around, but RAC Traffic aims to complement this default service with up to date traffic incident news. Does the app manage to reach its destination safely, or does it lose its way entirely? Read our review to find out.
Nokia Lumia 800: Driving with free Nokia Drive free satellite navigation
In a country like the UK, with its increasingly congested and overloaded roads, an app like RAC Traffic becomes almost essential for frequent travellers. It's this or constantly checking the BBC Travel website, which obviously works quickly on the Nokia Lumia 800's IE9 web browser, but can't possibly match a dedicated app for speed and accessibility.
On that front, RAC Travel works like a charm. An appraisal of all the traffic incidents in your vicinity is only a maximum of two taps away - and one of those taps is to open the app itself. The second tap, on the News tab from the main menu, utilizes Microsoft Maps (shame it can't use Nokia Maps really) to give you a map of the UK, then places coloured dots according to where the latest incidents are.
These dots are colour coded, with yellow being a light hold-up and red being something major that you really should avoid if you can help it. By tapping these coloured incident dots you receive a summary of where the incident is, which direction is affected and what the cause of the hold-up is. Precisely what you need to make informed navigation decisions, basically.
I encountered a few annoying niggles with this aspect of RAC Traffic that spoiled the experience somewhat. For one thing, I found that the app wouldn't home in on my location when I opened it up, in spite of the location services option being set to On. Sure enough, I checked both Nokia Maps and Microsoft Maps, and both accurately found my location without hesitation. The app seemed to have other ideas, depositing me on the edge of the Lake District as opposed to the middle of Cornwall - a mere difference of about 430 miles.
Having zoomed out and dragged frantically to find my true location, another annoying oversight became apparent - and this one couldn't be attributed to a bug or glitch in the programming. For some reason, the app makes you decide between viewing either incidents and delays or roadworks and planned events. This mystifying option is buried in the settings menu, too. Why not just show us everything at once, with a little more colour or even shape coding to differentiate? People don't really care what the source of a delay is - they just want to know if there are any and how they will impact their journey.
Outside of this main feature, RAC Traffic has a few extra tools, but they're hardly anything to write home about. One is the ability to contact the RAC with a single tap, regardless of whether you're a member or not. Of course, you could achieve this easily enough with your Nokia Lumia 800's integrated Bing search facility.
The other tool is a rudimentary route finder, which is useful for highlighting how your planned route intersects with any of those dastardly coloured dots. Again, though, this feature seems to have been poorly executed (or at least seriously glitchy), as I couldn't view said overlay unless I pinned the route to my Lumia 800's start menu.
The thought behind RAC Traffc is good, but much of the execution is sloppy and the interface needlessly laborious. We have high hopes for a quick update to resolve most of these issues, as the app has a lot of potential. For now, though, it's a bit like using a sat nav system that gets you to your destination via an overly elaborate route - you're glad it got you there, but things should have been so much easier.
RAC Traffic is available now for free on the Windows Phone Marketplace.