Monday Morning Punch

Whether you're an intrepid traveler always heading to new locations, or the stereotypical guy who won't ask for directions when lost, GPS phones can make your life easier.
The most obvious benefit is something many people already use GPS for: Driving directions. Even better: Walk by a store and your phone alerts you about a sale, find out if your kids are on their way home from school, take a snapshot with your camera phone and months later let your phone remind you exactly where you took that shot. Road warriors will certainly appreciate the integrated GPS feature when they're running to a meeting or simply looking for a restaurant in an unfamiliar place.

One such phone is the Nokia 6210 Navigator, Nokia's first GPS-enabled mobile device with an integrated compass for pedestrian navigation. The compass makes the navigation software aware of the direction you're pointing, which helps provide correct map views and guiding directions. The 6210 comes bundled with Nokia Maps 2.0. With free maps for more than 200 countries, and with 15 million points of interest pre-loaded, you can plan your route street by street, city to city. You pay extra for real-time GPS tracking and guided navigation, on a per week / month / year basis.

Because you're not always in your car when you travel, Nokia focused on enhancing pedestrian navigation, making available details such as walkways, bridges, tunnels, footpaths in parks and public transport information. Click on any point of interest on the map – from restaurants to tourist attractions – and you get detailed information about it, like the phone number or web address. Multimedia city guides, available at extra cost, introduce new locations enriched through photos, videos, and audio files.

If you prefer a GPS-enabled phone with a QWERTY keyboard, then check out Samsung's slender i780. While the keys are small, they are not too tiny to compromise comfortable thumb-typing. The i780 features an optical joystick that controls a mouse pointer, allowing you to navigate the user interface the same way you would handle the mouse cursor with a laptop's touchpad.

The phone I tested came pre-loaded with NAVFone navigation software from Agis. Your local service provider may bundle different navigation software. The fairly large database of addresses made searching for destinations a breeze. The precise spoken instructions meant that I never had to look at the map to verify what the voice said. Unfortunately, if I had to look at the map, the unique 320 x 320-resolution display of the i780 squished the NAVFone maps like a bread loaf trapped at the bottom of a grocery bag. Most applications, including NAVFone, were designed for a 320 x 240-resolution display.

To get a standard 320 x 240-resolution display along with a larger finger-friendly keyboard, go for the HTC Tytn II. The tilting touch screen gives you a better viewing angle when you’re editing documents using the bundled Office Mobile Suite, or if you’re viewing maps. The phone I tried had MapKing navigation software installed, although again, your service provider may bundle different software. You may have to pay extra if you want to use additional maps for other countries and cities. The latest MapKing version provides real-time traffic information to help you avoid jams. You can even send your current position via SMS to your friend, who in turn can import the coordinates and save it as a point of interest or directly perform a route to that location.

If you're a push-email junkie committed to Blackberry, then you’ll appreciate the integrated GPS feature of the Blackberry 8800. BlackBerry® Maps is free, but you pay data charges as the maps are downloaded. You can launch maps by typing or pasting in an address, or simply by clicking on an address in your address book – a great time-saving feature. As with all the other GPS software I tried, you get turn-by-turn directions quickly. Unlike the other GPS software, you don’t get spoken instructions.

Even Apple with its iPhone 3G has joined the GPS bandwagon. Billed as a phone that is "twice as fast at half the price," it sports the latest data connectivity options for faster download speed, and also has built-in GPS for enhanced location based mobile services. Take a photo with the camera, for example, and iPhone can geo-tags it with GPS location information. That way, when you share photos online, friends and family can see where every snapshot was taken.

Your phone doesn’t have built-in GPS? Don't sweat it. Nokia's LD-3W is a small GPS receiver that hooks up to your phone via Bluetooth. You're good to go so long as your phone has software that can interpret GPS information. For a device not bigger than a matchbox, it manages to acquire satellite signals from inside the car's glove compartment.
More and more, we're seeing GPS technology in mobile phones as frequently as cameras and music players. More and more too, the GPS applications in these phones are constantly improving, taking their maps closer to street level. The phones and applications sometimes still get confused – it once directed me to walk into a river, so local knowledge and common sense still wins hands down. But dumped in a strange town, these GPS phones will get you back to your hotel with little fuss.