10. Searching And Navigating With Nokia Maps, Continued

The original version can track your progress along your route but that’s an option you have to pay for in the updated version. If you want turn-by-turn voice navigation, you have to pay extra for that in both versions. Like the simulation, the voice navigation tells you to turn left or right but doesn’t speak road names. There’s a keyboard shortcut to repeat the last direction, which is certainly safer than digging through the menu to hear it again, but is not as good as hearing the direction at multiple distances before the turn (as you do with CoPilot).

Conclusion: Prepare To Pay

Nokia Maps tries to do what it can offline, to save you data charges or the bother of choosing a wireless hotspot. The problem is that it doesn’t always give you the option of looking online; sometimes this means you don’t know if you can’t find what you’re looking for because the software is not searching online or because it doesn’t know about it. The big plus is that you can plan ahead on routes, but you can do that for free on plenty of Websites. You do have the option of just looking up addresses and routes for free (assuming you download maps on your PC or via Wi-Fi) but that misses a lot of the point of GPS, so you’ll end up paying for navigation and probably paying data charges as well.

Although it has a budget option without navigation, Ask GPS makes no bones about charging you, and because of that, it makes full use of the network. The monthly service is cheaper than Nokia Maps. You don’t have to pay extra for reviews and there are no extra steps to go through to choose and activate navigation - you just pick where you want to go to. Nokia Maps has weekly and three-year prices for flexibility, but part of the point of a subscription service is the simplicity.

Nokia Maps is more like a traditional software application, with menus and options and settings; Ask GPS is less powerful but much simpler - and we found it did a better job of finding the places we were looking for.

Join our discussion on this article!