1. Why Would GPS Need 3G?

There are plenty of GPS navigation apps for smartphones, but finding one that works well can be tricky. You have to pick the right software for your phone platform and buy maps for the region to which you plan to travel. The phone needs enough storage and processing power to install the application and run it. You’ll also need to update it every year or so to get the latest maps and business details. You get powerful navigation with software like TomTom and the excellent CoPilot, but you also get some complexity.

With 3G, the connection is nominally fast enough so that instead of doing the hard work on your phone you can type in the query and send it with the GPS location data to the server and get addresses and directions back over the air. Nokia Maps works like this, unless you tell it not to use the network, while the new Ask GPS service that’s available for many Sprint phones - including feature phones that you couldn’t normally get navigation software on - does everything over the network.

A GPS tool that knows it’s running on a phone has several advantages. First, it offers fast acquisition and better battery life, because it knows which cellular network it’s in and can have the network tell it where to look for satellites.

The service can update the maps and POI database frequently without you having to remember to download updated listings to your device, so new restaurants and road junctions show up soon after they open. And with a mobile data connection, you’re able to look up related information or send your locations to people.

None of that matters if the actual navigation capability isn’t up to scratch, though. We tested Nokia Maps, on an N95, and Ask GPS, on a Sanyo M1. We ran the same tests that involved finding businesses, contacts and directions that we used to evaluate Google Maps, Yahoo! Go 2 and Windows Live Search in California, Cincinnati and Las Vegas, and we took the new CoPilot 7 along for comparison.

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