You’re in a rental car lost in a strange city with an inadequate or no map. What do you do? Do you ask someone for directions or drive around aimlessly hoping to spot a landmark you remember? Or do you pull out your mobile phone and enter the cross streets of the where you are and the address that you are looking for and receive turn by turn directions that speed to you destination? This review covers several mobile web sites that promise to provide you with driving directions wherever you are. Most of these sites are US only but similar sites exist around the world. For my tests I entered the same starting and ending points into each application. I used a couple of different test routes, one involving a short trip on local streets and the other a longer trip between two cities requiring a combination of surface streets and freeway.<\/p>\n
I found few differences in the directions themselves – all the sites returned accurate directions for my test routes. This is not surprising as these sites all get their data from either NavTeq<\/a> or TeleAtlas<\/a> the two market leaders in digital mapping data. There were, however major differences in usability and features.<\/p>\n
The WAP1 edition of Yahoo Driving Directions uses a wizard interface which walks you through entering an address step by step. First you chose how you want to enter your address (second image). The first two options, (Zip code, City\/State) give you general directions to or from the center of a city or zip code. Airport takes a 3-letter code like SFO or LAX. In addition to entering an address, you can pick one from your Yahoo address Book or from your Yahoo Maps Favorite Locations. The Favorite Locations feature appears broken – on my phone as well as the Nokia and Openwave emulators I get a compile error trying to open the list of favorites and the W3c Validator<\/a> reports that the xml is not well formed.<\/p>\n
Yahoo Driving Directions: wml\/xHtml-mp<\/a>
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Infospace Driving Directions: wml\/xHtml-mp<\/a>
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Google<\/b> has Driving Directions on their WAP2 mobile site. You can get to the them by choosing Local Search and then driving directions. The direct URL is here<\/a> The interface is almost identical to Yahoo’s WAP2 implementation of driving directions – two text input boxes (From<\/i>: and To<\/i>:) and a Get Directions<\/i> button. Google’s input parser is good, you can enter things like “3160 mission sf ca” and it correctly interprets it as “3160 Mission St. San Francisco CA 94110”. Unlike Yahoo you can’t enter just the first few letters of a city. Even “San Francisc” will return an error. At least it does return an error unlike Infospace which seems to return directions to unknown and unspecified places if it doesn’t recognize you input. The actual directions that Google provides appear to be identical to Yahoo’s.<\/p>\n
Google Driving Directions: xhtml-mp<\/a>
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There is another way to specify an address for directions in Go2. That is to start with the Go2 directory and then use the results of a directory search for a place of business as a starting or ending point. The directory is based on the telephone yellow pages and is a very complete list of business addresses. If you have a Go2 account, you can also use one of your saved locations or favorites as a starting or ending point. I covered<\/a> the Go2 directory in a previous post. It’s a very powerful but not particularly user friendly application that is well worth learning if you are at all interested in using your mobile for real world navigation.<\/p>\n
Go2 Driving Directions: wml\/xhtml-mp<\/a>
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MapQuest Driving Directions: wml\/cHtml<\/a>
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Windows Mobile Live<\/strong>I was surprised that Microsoft doesn’t offer driving directions on their Windows Mobile Live deck. Actually they do but only when you first do a local search on Windows Mobile Live Search at mobile.live.com\/search<\/a>. If you search for say “flowers” near “1618 van ness, sf, ca”, Live can provide directions from that address to any of the flower shops that the search returned. Strange that there is no general purpose driving directions page. Well there IS one at mobile.live.com\/maps\/maps.aspx<\/a> but you will only see it if you are using a PDA,
\na Windows Mobile MS Smartphone or a PC. It’s a very nice implementation which remembers your most recent entries and offers you the option of viewing overview and turn by turn maps. The PDA site is designed for a 240px wide screen and would work on the many recent non-MS phones with a QVGA screen – if only Microsoft would let it. It could also be redesigned to work on other phone browsers. All the pieces already exist as part of Live Local Search. Driving directions seem like such a basic and natural use for the mobile web. The lack of a generalized directions page on Live Mobile is a glaring gap in MS’s basic mobile portal service. With Microsoft’s recent push both in mapping and in mobile I’d be really surprised if they didn’t offer directions to mainstream phones soon.<\/p>\n
Windows Mobile Live Driving Directions: cHtml for PDAs and Windows Smartpones only!<\/a>
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I’ve put links to all of the mobile sites reviewed above in the \/Travel-Transit\/Driving Directions folder<\/a> on the YesWAP mobile portal (yeswap.com<\/a>). Visit YesWAP with your mobile device, try them all out and find out which works best for you on your device. As always, comments are appreciated.<\/p>\n
You’re in a rental car lost in a strange city with an inadequate or no map. What do you do? Do you ask someone for directions or drive around aimlessly hoping to spot a landmark you remember? Or do you pull out your mobile phone and enter the cross streets of the where you are and the address that you are looking for and receive turn by turn directions that speed to you destination? This review covers several mobile web … Continue reading