6. Nokia Maps

Nokia Maps is a free application for Windows Mobile and Series 60 and it’s supplied with the Nokia N95, which has a built-in GPS receiver. It downloads maps over your data or Wi-Fi connection (although after you’ve used it once, you can download maps on your PC and side-load them to a memory card on your phone to save data charges but you’ll need a big data card to do it as California alone takes 90 MB). Either the MapLoader software or the Nokia site it downloads from is very slow.

If you have a map covering the entire area you’re interested in you can tell the software not to use the network connection. It will then search for addresses and points of interest and find routes from the map information. This means you can use the software completely free if you invest the time to set it up and don’t mind not getting updates to maps automatically. If you want to search beyond the maps you already have, you have to turn on network access (and specifically pick whether you want to use 3G or Wi-Fi and sometimes even which access point).

Confusingly Nokia Maps is also called Smart2Go, after the company that originally wrote it. Also, confusingly, the v3.0 in the N95 isn’t the latest version; the latest version is v1.2 (because after Nokia bought the company, they renamed the shipping version as v1). Updating the phone firmware doesn’t upgrade the version of Nokia Maps, but it does fix some problems. Without the update, you can’t calculate a route or search for addresses or points of interest anywhere you haven’t already downloaded the map for and asking Nokia Maps to preview the route often deletes it instead.

Upgrading to the latest version of Nokia Maps gives you A-GPS (which uses the signal from the cell tower to speed up locating satellites), a slightly streamlined interface and one significant downgrade. You have to pay $13 a month (or $112 a year) for turn-by-turn voice navigation, with rerouting if you make a wrong turn, in both versions. But route tracking - seeing your GPS location on the map at the same time as the route - is free in v3.0 but requires the navigation subscription in the updated version.