Mar

2 free navigation programs for your Windows Mobile phone

by: scottc

Google Maps Mobile

Google Maps Mobile was the first decent online mapping program with satellite imagery (built upon the work of Keyhole), and it was also the first online map program for Windows Mobile. There had been other navigation packages, but they all depended on local storage of the maps and were fairly expensive.

With the advent of more Windows powered phones, Google maps mobile made it possible to download an application under 1Mb, and have access to the entire map database Google had to offer.

The search feature in Google Maps Mobile (GMM) is like everything else Google does; nice and simple. You just enter what/where and press "ok". Search terms like "pizza in New York" or "UPS store in Orlando" are processed quickly. The best feature of GMM is "My Location". My Location uses the "secret" ID of local mobile phone towers to roughly calculate your location, and bases searches on the results. It’s accurate within about 200 feet. No GPS hardware is required, but it only works on some phones/providers. My Sprint Mogul does not support it (but thanks to the integrated GPS I don’t need it).

Searches return results with all the information you’d normally find on the desktop Google search page; name, address, web site and phone number. Once you’ve found a location you were looking for, you can navigate to/from it, send it as a text message or find other local businesses.

The routing portion of GMM is simple; just like searching, you can use an address, a zip or almost any other search term that’ll allow Google to link an address to it. The directions are clear and include traffic delays, distance and duration.

With GPS enabled, the program actually does a good job of working as a full navigation package.

You can download Google Maps Mobile from the GMM website.

Microsoft Live Search

It took Microsoft a bit to catch up with Google, which had to be embarrassing for them, since they build the OS… The first version was fairly limited, but in the past year more and more features have been added, which have resulted in a pretty decent application which manages to differentiate itself from Google Maps Mobile.

The most powerful feature of Live Search is voice recognition. Instead of typing your destination, you speak, then the voice sample is sent to Microsoft and the actual recognition is done on their servers. On my 3G phone the entire process only takes about 5 seconds, and the accuracy is amazing. Even foreign sounding names are recognized instantly. In the event it can’t understand exactly what you meant, it’ll offer some results of what it thought it heard.

The search is a little more confusing than Google maps. In Live Search you need to select the location before you can proceed with the destination name. In Google you could simply ask for "Apple store in Chicago", but with Live search you need to set the search to Chicago first, then search for the Apple store.

Just like in the Google application, maps can be viewed as a regular map or a satellite image. Traffic can also be overlayed on the map.

Routing is fast, because like most other tasks all the hard work is done remotely. The route request it sent to the Microsoft Live servers, calculated, then the results are returned to your PDA.

Microsoft have taken more features from their desktop version of Live, and made them available on the mobile version. Through the application, you also have access to gas prices, movie times and a local traffic map.

The gas prices are sorted within a certain search radius by price and you get prices for all fuel types.