[Parlay44]

There's a GPS app I use on my iPhone that I think is great and worth sharing here. It's called Waze and it's free. They recently got bought out by google so they'll hopefully get even better.

Two cool features I wanted to note here:

1. Police notifications - As you're driving you get notification en route of upcoming reported police locations. You can also report a cop through the app as you're driving. It gets uploaded to their server and everyone's map is updated.

2. Friends can track your progress - There's a cool feature where you can text a link to a friend. They open it on their smartphone to a web page that shows your real time position on a map, your destination and ETA. Very handy. You can also post it on your Facebook wall and anyone can track your progress.

Try out the app. It's awesome.

http://www.waze.com/

[the_conductor]

Does it work completely independent of your 4G data connection and allow you to save maps to your phone so you can view them offline? Driving to unfamiliar places with no data connection will still be a problem for smartphone GPS apps if they don't have these features.

I'm currently testing out the Sygic app for offline maps, GPS and turn by turn navigation -it beats the default Android Navigation app and Google Maps combo imo as there is no on-the-road data connection required and it works across the globe with no restrictions.

Here's a link to offline maps and Navigation apps :http://www.androidfanclub.net/2013/03/top-offline-voice-navigation-apps-android.html

[DVY]

Waze is good stuff. It just got bought out as well.

[Basil Ransom]

Waze is great.

One thing, why did Google pay a billion dollars for it? The value in Waze is the traffic reporting from users, which Google already gets when people use Google Maps to navigate. Google already has a huge user base, bigger than Waze. It could introduce the same features and catch up with Waze pretty quickly. The only reason I see is to keep Waze out of the hands of competitors.

Waze's directions in traffic are far better than Google's. Only downside to Waze is that the color scheme and drawings are gay as hell. Vastly prefer Google's color scheme.