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Sunday, February 21, 2010

GPS Navigation for Blackberry Follow Up

Some of you may have read my initial post on Navigation options on the Blackberry after Amaze decided to start charging for their navigation service. I listed several possible options that were revealed after searching. I think I've given each one a good run, and to save you the reading...nothing good.

Nav4All - Recently announced that TeleNav NavTeq (Editted per Ralf's comment) did not renew their subscription to provide Nav4All their data. So instantly 24 million users had the doors shut on them...and surprise surprise Telenav also announced that they have a navigation app and would gladly accept $10 / month to use the service.

Life in Pocket - Definately works to give Turn by Turn navigation, however there's a catch...no map! It shows a nice picture of a the intended turn...terrific.

Poynt + Google Maps - Isn't navigation at all, Poynt is just a search engine that acts like a wrapper to Google Maps. That's good, because everybody knows that Google really wasn't made for searches...:-P

Google Navigation - Still the true winner, and I've never even seen it in action aside from videos. The wife will be getting her Android next week, a Samsung Moment. Needless to say, this geek is excited considering she was initally leaning towards a Palm Pixie. (However, while researching things for this blog post I found out the Moment is still shipping with Android 1.5, so no Google Navigation out of the box, but it appears they will be updating to 1.6 or 2.0 soon....hrmmm) As far as Blackberry receiving Google Navigation there has not been any official news but the reality is it will happen like everything else...about 6 months behind the iPhone. And the iPhone is rumored to receive it "as soon as Apple gives the go ahead" according to a Google Spokeperson. Can't we all just get along?!

So there we have it, no good options but to work with except the current Google Maps interface with no turn by turn. But as I'm attempting to feign a sense of objectivity...here's a few options that aren't free:

Amaze - While I can't fault a company for wanting to make a buck, this one in my opinion was not worth almost $3 / month service fee.

Telenav - The convenient newcomer to the scene once Nav4All shut it's doors unexpectedly is $10 / month.

Garmin - This is a one time fee of $100..not exactly chump change, but at least you don't have to pay for it monthly. There is a 7 day free trial, so I guess if I cared more I'd give it a shot.

I'm sure there are more, but I only care about paid apps so much, after all I have a pretty well functioning blackberry without paying a dime for any pay apps. Of course..there are apps I wish existed or worked better, but that's a whole different post.

2 comments:

  1. I think you meant to say Navteq not TeleNav in second paragraph.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Absolutely correct, my apologies. It has been corrected.

    ReplyDelete