Wednesday, February 16, 2011

Android - No Google Navigation in India ? No Problems WAZE is here to stay

Undoubtedly for my Android 2.1 powered (which has been hacked now to uninstall the unofficial Froyo 2.2 firmware) new Samsung Galaxy 5 had been a welcome change for me, after almost 10 years of Nokia use. Overall it was a good move, except the fact that Google Maps still does not provide Voice navigation for India on its Android platform. This seems pretty strange since India is definitely one of the emerging markets.

Being addicted to voice based Navigation, I stumbled across Waze (http://world.waze.com) for Android. I had used Waze on my Symbian device before, but was not impressed primarily due to it's sluggish behaviour on the underpowered handset.

But once I installed Waze on my Samsung Galaxy 5 device, I was in bit of a pleasant surprise. The voice based navigation works as a charm, and POI (Points Of Interest) search also fetches results from Google.  Additionally at the time of writing I guess Waze is the only navigation software providing real time traffic updates (Based on Social collaboration).

Waze also provides other regular features like your speed, ETA, time remaining for travel etc. Also it is supposed to use most frequently used routes and propose new routes accordingly.

On the flipside the maps are not stored locally(This is one luxury which was only available with Nokia OVI Maps, even Google Maps currently does not support this), though the data transfer is not humongous.


Two thumbs up for WAZE and definitely a must try, if you would love using GPS on your Android Handset in India.

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