Google Navigation vs The Tom-Tom

Sound odd? Well it might but….

The fact is for anybody siting in a major metro area using Google Navigation would serve as a valid substitute. Run it on the hand held as Purdy does here or for those that have gone the carputer route add it as a feature in your system. –

I’ve been using Google Maps Navigation on an HTC G1, which is not the higher-powered, bigger-screened Droid it was designed for. That said, Navigation has delivered that “I’m living in the future” feeling that makes you start mentally marking down the margin you paid for your gadgets. It combines a slew of services Google has recently refined—overhead maps and street-level images, voice recognition, local searches with plain English queries, and traffic data from real drivers—and presents them in an interface that’s surprisingly inviting and useful, given Google’s tendency for the Hey It Works school of design. More than anything, though, it’s free, the data it serves up is free, and it’ll always remain up to date for free.

That’s not to say that my Garmin, a Nuvi 350 model bought for about $100, doesn’t do its primary job, and do it well once it’s working. But Google’s free offering has made my phone the go-to gadget for navigating across the city or on same-day car trips. For long drives across regions without great cellular coverage, you might still want a stand-alone GPS unit. Navigation downloads all the map data over your phone’s data connection, while most GPS devices store gigabytes worth of map data locally.

What makes this an even more viable solution is WiMax. Clear is rolling out WiMax in some major markets this year and next. One can connect their carputer to a WiMax connection and have full broadband data interlink to use with system. Need updates? Just punch them in and Google will recompute your route on the fly.

Linky.