by Eric Fenton

Created on: April 14, 2008

Now that everyone who makes mobile devices has been putting a GPS in it, it's not long until our wristwatches give us directions to the nearest Starbucks. The newest rage, though, is putting a GPS in your phone. It's a great idea - you have your phone with you all the time anyways, so why make you carry an extra, separate device that has a tendency to get stolen from cars?

Almost every major phone carrier has their own proprietary GPS system. AT&T uses TeleNav, Verizon uses VZ-Navigator, and so on. As of the time of this writing, T-Mobile is the only major U.S. carrier that doesn't have its own GPS software, but don't despair - the carrier stuff isn't all that great anyways.

There's one awesome thing about getting your carrier to build the software for you - you know it'll work. Each carrier tests every single one of their phones pretty extensively to make sure everything works right. Sprint's navigation system works more or less the best, but that's pretty much only because Sprint's data network is so much faster than everyone else's. While you're sitting around waiting for the other guys to load the information, the car with Sprint is already rocketing away.

In my experience, though, the best navigation software for your phone is Google Maps. Just like pretty much everything else Google, the maps software is extremely easy to use and works very well. If your phone has built-in GPS, you get your GPS signal and it tells you exactly where you are, but Google Maps can even find you if your phone doesn't have GPS! It can triangulate your position using the cell phone signals (just like on T.V. detective shows), although the precision is not nearly as high as GPS. If you're in a big metro area with a lot of cell towers, though, they can get you down to a couple hundred meters.

You do also have a few other options. BlackBerry devices, made by RIM, come with BlackBerry Maps, which is a pretty powerful tool in its own right. If you have GPS built-in on your phone or if you buy a Bluetooth external GPS add-on (expensive!), you can use BlackBerry Maps or Google Maps (I personally prefer Google).

The best thing to do is to try out each program and see what works for you. Google Maps is free, so you don't have to worry about it, and most cell phone distributor stores will let you check out their phones before you buy them. If you're already tied to a certain carrier, though, just compare the built-in software to Google Maps.

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