TomTom’s arrival on the iPhone was talked about back at Apple’s WWDC a few months ago, but it wasn’t until the middle of last month that it actually turned from talk to action.

The sat nav application, which is available in both UK and international versions, is available to download from iTunes with a starting price tag of around £60 (for the UK version), which isn’t bad when you consider how much you’ll have to shell out for ‘proper’ unit. Talking of sat nav kit, TomTom plans to release a car kit soon, which will make it easier for drivers to make use of the shiny new app. We tested it in the passenger’s seat (would have been a bit dangerous otherwise) and in pedestrian mode, but we’re looking forward to testing it out in more depth once the car kit is in our clutches. Which, according to TomTom, should be around October time.

If you’ve ever got lost on your way to a business meeting and turned up several hours late, looking like a drowned rat because it was raining and you were wandering the streets clutching a soggy map printed from the internet the day before, you’ll like this app a lot. Although a word of warning, if you’ve never used a sat nav device before in any capacity, it takes a tiny bit of getting used to. But a few random button presses and ‘oh, didn’t want that but it’s interesting’ moments later and the training session is complete.

Downloading the app takes a matter of minutes. Once done, fire up the app for the first time and you’re greeted by a very serious, but at the same time amusing, disclaimer that admits no liability for anything at all. If you’re too busy looking at your iPhone and bump into a lamp post, tough. Or if you just try and get directions and the poor app gets them wrong or can’t help, same deal: tough.

We like the honesty. But we’re pleased to report neither of those things happened during our tests.

Navigating to your destination is quite easy. You just simply enter where you need to go. Although be sure to enter the city first, then the address otherwise you may end up somewhere completely random if you’re not paying attention.

You can also easily retrace your steps with recently visited destinations and unleash the nosey person in you by locating points of interest. And, in traditional iPhone style, you can call up these places with the swoosh of a finger.

Switching between views was also a doodle with 2D and 3D modes on offer that you can easily tab between. And, if you’ve got address data saved in your phone book attached to your contacts, the app will guide you there easily too. In super speedy time too if you’ve selected an IQ route.

Although, to state the obvious, don’t expect great results in a poor GPS-signal area.

We were left wandering around Epping Forest for quite some time trying to get out! The car kit is touted as having GPS-boosting strength, although as far as we know you can’t drive a car through the middle of that particular forest, so if it wasn’t for my brilliant ability to search out the road, I may still be there now!

If, for some reason, you still want to use your new sat nav device as a phone too, worry not. If someone calls you, the app will switch off and into call mode, but you can kick off from where you left once you’ve finished chatting, or just hung up!

There’s very little to complain about with this app. Once you’ve warmed up, it’s easy to use and very pleasant on the eye too. If anything, our only gripes would be the fact that you have to make do with ‘normal’ rather than celebrity voices to guide you (if you turn on that feature) and that the app could only locate actual bank-branded cash machines when we searched for them, meaning if we didn’t know they were there, we’d have missed out on the one attached to the supermarket round the corner and travelled five minutes in the other direction. But, as above, these are more issuettes rather than big problems.

All in all, we found this app rather pleasant and look forward to putting it through its paces in a full review when the car kit’s out.

The video below shows the app being shown off at WWDC.