Get satnav for free!

by Anna Powell on 03 November 2010  |  12 comments
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Anna Powell shows you how you can get satnav absolutely free! And while you’re at it, never pay for an Ordnance Survey map again.

Being a consumer while giants battle it out for the future of an industry comes with certain benefits.

It’s a bit like being a child of divorced parents - you spend weekdays with Mum, who lets you stay up late on Playstation, and weekends with Dad, who gives you sweets. Then they both ask, “Who do you like best?”

In the last few years, big companies have been battling it out for the future of online mapping.

Google Maps first brought us beautiful, simple, draggable maps in 2005.

Spooked, Microsoft bought UK company Multimap in 2007, and now promotes its Bing Maps as an alternative to Google.

And as a result, we benefit from free high-quality online maps. Isn’t it great? Obviously, these companies only want to give us maps in order to fire location-based advertising at our eyeballs, but let’s ignore that.

Anyway, the battle has brought two free online mapping extras that not enough people know about. These are as follows:

1. Free navigation applications that outclass most dedicated satnav terminals. If you have shares in TomTom or Garmin, sell them now: I’ve seen the future, and it’s free.
2. Free Ordnance Survey maps. If you’re a walker - not a driver - skip to the bottom to learn how to get free walking maps online.

Google’s satnav killer

Everyone’s heard of Google Maps, and most people know that it lets you look up driving, walking and some public transport directions online. (For example, here’s how to drive from Alton Towers to McDonalds, continuing the ‘divorced parents’ theme.)

But not everyone knows that the same route-by-route driving directions are also available on Android mobile phones, with full turn-by-turn, spoken instructions. Ladies and gentlemen - I give you Google Maps Navigation.

Now, the big caveat here is that you basically have to have an Android phone to use Navigation. If you’re an iPhone or Nokia user, see below for alternatives. 

Navigation is just like satnav, but in many ways better - with voice search, the ability to look for local businesses just like Google Maps, and a superb user interface. And because it connects live to the internet, you always have the latest maps and data.

I can’t claim that this is hot-off-the press news. Google announced Navigation in October 2009. (Incidentally, TomTom shares fell 21% the same day.)

For six months, it was only available to US drivers, but it came to the UK in April. And it wasn’t until I went on a driving holiday around England this summer that I was convinced it could really replace satnav.

We took no maps, and relied on Navigation to drive from Wiltshire to Pembrokeshire. It worked brilliantly: free, no getting lost, and even better, no rows about getting lost!

Navigation: how it works

Navigation comes built-in to the Google Maps app, as long as you’re running version 1.6 or up, which most of us are.

Really, the best way to see how Navigation works is to watch the official video. But if you don’t have time, here’s a quick rundown of how to use it and some of its features:

• Search in plain English, rather than selecting fiddly addresses
• Search by voice: “Pizza Express”
• Live traffic indicators: routes go red if they’re jammed
• Search along route: find pubs or petrol on the way
• Satellite view and street view
• Special ‘car dock’ mode
• It’s free!

Before you try using it, two extras are essential: an unlimited data contract (or you’ll need a second mortgage), and an in-car charger, as Navigation hoovers up battery.  A car dock isn’t a bad idea either. 

Just so I don’t sound like a total Google fan-girl, here are the downsides:

• It suffers in areas with limited data - though it caches the route at the beginning of your journey, so even if you lose connection, it will still tell you the route, even if you can’t see the map. We drove round rural Pembrokeshire, and coped.
• No celebrity voices, unfortunately: no Stephen Fry or John Cleese. Instead your navigator is a stern American woman.
• The US text-to-speech struggles with some English street-names, though generally in a way that’s amusing, rather than incomprehensible.
• And the data is, like most satnavs, imperfect - particularly, it sometimes shows businesses that have moved or closed - but again, we coped.

Luckily, Google has aimed its Android operating system at the cheaper end of the market (fighting Apple this time), so there is a good range of phones available.

Recent question on this topic

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  Does anyone know if Lovemoney are going to release a Android Application for smartphones? I would love to be able to check my finances on the go.

  • 
    Saul answered "Yes, we are starting development of mobile applications this quarter, so you will soon be able to..."
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iPhone/Nokia options

If you’re a Nokia user on certain phones, you can get free navigation with Ovi Maps. However, I haven’t used it so can’t tell you whether it’s any good or not.

Alas, Google have stated that Navigation won’t be coming to iPhone in the near future. There are various paid satnav apps on the iPhone App Store.

Free alternatives for iPhone are the Skrobbler or new NavFree apps, which are based on OpenStreetMap.

Now, OpenStreetMap is one of the great achievements of our times, and should be about 1,000 times more famous than it is. It’s a free, open, collaboratively edited map of the world - the Wikipedia of maps.

I haven’t used either app, and probably neither is perfect, but they should be worth a look - if you’ve tried them, please let us know in the comments boxes below.

Ordnance Survey maps free

Here’s another maps-on-the-cheap tip. Bing Maps (Microsoft’s attempt to enter the online mapping world) now makes full Ordnance Survey maps available online, up to a 1:25000 scale. Here’s the area around Legoland, footpaths and all.

OS data is pretty expensive, and the OS’s own online map effort is somewhat grudging. But luckily for us, Microsoft have all the cash in the world, and are desperate for Bing to beat Google Maps. Hence, lovely free OS maps for all!

Note, if you print them, make sure you use a decent colour printer. I’ve been on at least one two-mile detour because we hadn’t spotted that our printer’s red ink well was broken, and none of the footpaths printed. It was funny afterwards.

What have I missed? Please let us know in the comments boxes below.

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