App offers plenty of other Waze

Users can create or join groups with friends or drivers who share similar routes through the onscreen software, enabling direct warnings to each other.

There are pitfalls though. The app may be free to download, but keeping it running will eat into your data bundle. Then, to be a part of the community the app needs to be running – whether you’re using it for directions or not – which besides the data implications can be detrimental to your smartphone’s battery life. And there’s our network coverage to consider too – the app will work with 3G and Edge coverage only.

We gave Waze a test run and found it quite easy to download and set up. Besides the odd signal issue it worked well en-route and, provided the car was stationary, we got quite a few pop up messages of problem roads within a wide vicinity.

The map was corrected automatically to avoid a problem on our actual route but, more interestingly, at the outset it planned a quiet route I would never have considered.

But yes, it wasn’t kind on my battery, and the longer route used 1 684KB of data (you can monitor data usage).

Some may argue that this app is the same as TomTom Live, but according to the Tomtom app on my iphone the Live technology will cost me six dollars per month (R46) or 38 dollars (R290) per year just to access.

Waze being free to download is the real selling point.