Navteq has updated their free mobile traffic site, mobi.traffic.com. The major changes since I last looked at the site are the ability to search for your city by zip code and maps!

Traffic.com covers over 50 U.S. metropolitan areas and lets you pick yours from a drop down list. That can be a tedious process on some basic phones that only let you slowly scroll the list one line at a time. The addition of a zip code field makes finding your city easier in such cases.

Maps may not seem like a big deal but up to now mobi.traffic.com was map-less, relying instead on a thermometer graphic to show the relative congestion on each road. The thermometers are still available but I think many users will prefer the more traditional maps which use the typical green, yellow and  red color coding to indicate the speed that traffic is flowing  on each highway. The maps can be zoomed and scrolled. There are 20 zoom levels and the maps are very detailed at the highest one.

Mobi.traffic retains it’s best feature, “Your Trips” which lets you define turn by turn routes for frequent trips like your  commute or the drive to the beach. When you log in to the mobile site you will immediate see current conditions for each segment of all your trips. The only downside of “Your Trips” is that you have to set it up in advance on Traffic.com’s desktop site.

All the features of mobi.traffic.com are free. An added bonus for U.S. T-Mobile prepaid customers, is that it’s one of the handful of sites that prepaid customers get free access to. You won’t find Traffic.com in the T-Zones menu though,  you will need to enter the URL manually,  but that’s a small price to pay for live traffic information for most U.S. metropolitan areas. Source: GISuser.

Filed in: Wap Review Directory – Search/Traffic

Ratings: Content Usability

Ready.mobi Score: 3 “Fair”

Mobile Link: mobi.traffic.com