Where's Waldo Lane?
Telenav Phone GPS Sniffs Out The Neighborhood
...and Beyond
Pat Meier-Johnson
I often don' t know where I am going, but most of the time I know where I have been. Most of the time.
Telenav GPS Navigator, a service and Bluetooth device that let you get voice and graphical GPS directions on your mobile phone has become my driving pal over the past few weeks. I installed it on my Treo 650 and my husband and I left our home in the woods, winding our way down the mountain as we have several days a week for the past nine years. The Telenav voice spoke the turns and the display showed the names of streets. "Hey, did you know there's a Cape Court here," Russ said. I had never paid attention to it. Nor had I noticed Seymour Lane after passing by well more than 4,000 times.
Was I so intent on peering down other sidestreets for lurking police
waiting for hapless drivers to race up and down our mountain or commit
the infamous California rolling stop that I couldn't tell you what was
less than a half mile from our house? Seems so. Cape Ct. looks like a
nice place. Maybe we should walk by there sometime.
Not too
many phones have built-in GPS yet, so you'll need the Telenav GPS
Receiver for $99, which is small, easy to toss in a pocket, and has a
skid-resistant backing so it stays put on the dashboard. It paired
using Bluetooth with a Treo 650 I already likely had, and installed so
smoothly from an online download that I was almost disappointed not to
have to tweak it or hassle with it. (Okay, call it my twisted form of
bonding with technology.) If you have a data or email service plan on
your phone, you don't need to buy anything else except for the $9.99
per month subscription (you can buy two years for $199).
On a
recent trip down the 101 to Pasadena, the tiny GPS navigation receiver
let us browse restaurants that would be within reach just about the
time our stomachs would begin to rumble, guided us to addresses we
keyed in on-screen, and brought us directly to our hotel that we
selected from the Telenav Biz Finder hotel listing by name. With
plenty of advance warning, the voice, which was surprisingly clear on
the Treo, told us whether we would be turning right or left, merging
slightly, entering a highway or whether our destination would be on the
right or left.
The moving map told us how far it was to the
next turn, the direction of our travel, how far it would be to our next
destination, what street we were on and what street we would turn
onto. We could view the whole route using a summary view with the
miles between each turn. If we wandered off-course, it kindly guided
us back on course.
On our return trip, Telenav presented a
selection of gas stations and listed them by the price per gallon, with
as much as a .20 per gallon difference. Had I only wanted to find a
Chevron station, for instance, I could have keyed that in by hand. Or
if I had a hankering for Starbucks coffee, I could find any within 15
miles and how far I'd have to go to get there. Telenav also offers a
voice recognition call-in number that lets you enter destinations by
voice that land on your phone without your ever taking your eyes off
the road.
It's easy to take the road less traveled and at one point we could select Interstate 5, continue on Highway 101 or go west and take the scenic Highway 1 Coastal Highway. While Telenav could not tell us of the stockyard stench nor the boring scenery of I-5, it did offer mileage and time travel estimates, and allowed us to choose by fastest, shortest, highway or not, or even would guide us if we planned to walk back the several hundred miles to the Bay Area on foot.
Downsides: you can't make calls, do SMS or check email without exiting the Telenav application. The GPS lost contact when we were deep in the bowels of a concrete parking structure, but if I can't find may way out of a parking garage on my own, I shouldn't be driving anyway.
If you do a lot of traveling, or even if you have a penchant for getting lost, either on purpose or by accident, Telenav can save you frustration and you'll never have to fold a map again. Beyond the joy of getting somewhere flawlessly, if you compare the monthly fee to a Hertz rental car with NeverLost GPS that typically costs and extra $10 per day, you'll quickly see the wisdom in making Telenav your own.
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