Android users got a nice surprise today when it was discovered that Google has made its free turn-by-turn sat nav feature available to users in the UK and Ireland. Up to now this feature was only available on Android devices in the US.
The new feature has been deployed in Beta Form and will work on any Android handset running version 1.6 or higher. You can download the beta app from the Android Market Place as of today, and start taking advantage of the free, voice guided, turn-by-turn navigation on your Android device.
So what are the key features in Google Maps Navigation? Well it’s essentially just as good as your regular Garmin or TomTom sat nav. Of course you get 3D maps and it has the basic search function, just type in something like you would if you were on Google. Say you search for Pizza, it will then give you a list of nearby locations where you can get Pizza and then once you’ve chosen one it will navigate there for you.
It also has a search by Voice feature, so you can simply just talk to your handset and it will determine where you want to go. What’s more it also has support for live traffic updates, an on-screen indicator glows green, yellow or red based on current traffic conditions along your route and a single touch on the indicator toggles a traffic view that shows the traffic ahead.
There is also a car dock mode which displays a simplified home screen with large finger friendly controls to make it easier to use when driving.
This will cause quite a stir among traditional sat navs on mobile devices, on the iPhone if you want sat nav from the likes of TomTom you will find yourself forking over a fair bit of cash. Now Google Maps Navigation is free to download and subsequent updates are also free because the up-to-date mapping data is constantly refreshed on Google Maps itself.
Nokia recently announced that it’s OVI maps were now free on Nokia devices as well so now we have two major smartphone manufacturers offering free sat nav on their devices.
httpd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGXK4jKN_jY&feature=player_embedded#!
What do you think?
Will this make you think twice about buying a sat nav device, and instead opt for an Android device?
Let us know in the comments
