WP8 Waze Beta Preview

On June 18th, the Waze Beta app for Windows Phone was finally released to select beta testers. Although Google's recent acquisition of Waze has brought on thoughts of concern for the app's future on the Windows Phone platform, the beta release shows a good start to the app's eventual release.

Since Waze was one of my favorite apps while I was using iOS I signed up for the beta program when it was initially announced and was eventually accepted. It was nice to see the app running on my Windows phone and after initially using it, my first thoughts are mixed.

Using it in the city of San Francisco, the general GPS and navigation performance was solid enough. However, there are a few issues in this beta such as a fairly large battery drain even while charging, compatibility issues with playing music and navigating, and random crashes. Of course, the purpose of a beta is to iron out these types of problems and hopefully over time all these issues will be worked out before the actual release.

For those interested, I'll try to keep you updated on the progress.