Even the biggest Apple fanboy has to have a few pangs of jealousy when they see an Android phone withGoogle Navigation but the new Navfree iPhone app aims to close that gap by offering free turn-by-turn audible navigation.
The Navfree iPhone app offer free turn-by-turn navigation with audible directions, Google Local and Microsoft Bing search, automatic routing, destination search and all the features you’d expect from a navigation app. You’ll be able to download map data to the device for quick loading and you’ll even be able to access your music library from the mapping screens.
How can the Navfree iPhone app offer these services for free when others like TomTom have to charge? Well, this app uses OpenStreetMap for its data, so it doesn’t have to pay any licensing fees for its mapping data like other companies do (Google has the money to create its own map data).
Of course, relying on crowd sourcing information for mapping isn’t anything new, as Waze has been doing this for a while. Waze has been able to build up its community and this leads to it having good maps.
The Navfree iPhone app may be suffering from not having enough people in its crowd yet. One review of the app said there’s no database:
Typed in 15 different street names and it couldn’t find any of them. Also doesn’t autofill as you type so you have to know the exact spelling. Makes it tough when you don’t know if it’s N. Broadway or North broadway. Until the database fills in this is pretty worthless.
Other reviews suggest that it is a mixed bag but I’m sure that it will get better as more and more people use it. It’s a chicken-and-egg problem though: the service won’t get better until more people use it but more people won’t use it until the service gets better.
You can download it here (iTunes link) and let us know what you think.
[Via Mac Observer]