FREE Turn your iPhone into a sat nav – for free!
One of the compelling reasons to choose a phone running Google’s Android OS over an iPhone is that some recent models include free sat nav. There are many sat nav apps for the iPhone 3G or later but they can be expensive. Now, we have a free alternative.
UK price: Free
US price: Free
Web: www.skobbler.co.uk
Download size: 3.5MB
iPod touch compatible: Yes
Requires: iOS 4.0 or later
The idea’s solid: the expensive thing in sat navs is the map data, but skobbler uses data from OpenStreetMap, a community created map to which you are invited to contribute bug reports. While this keeps costs down, it does mean that map data can be sketchy – or flat-out wrong – especially in rural areas. The app itself isn’t a multi gigabyte download because it downloads and caches maps as needed; great for low-capacity iPhones, but it does mean that you need a data connection to get going.
The app itself is good; it was created by a splinter group of developers from Navigon, and it shows both in the styling and feature-set. You get good voice prompts (including text-tospeech renderings of road names) and, as well as the option of controlling iPod audio, automatic ducking of the background audio when voice prompts are given. It’s not yet iOS 4-aware for background navigation, however. Address look-up is poor too, and there are no points of interest.
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