Wayfinder

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Wayfinder is a mobile navigation system which currently runs on Symbian 2nd and 3rd edition, UIQ, Windows Mobile and some other smartphones. It is guided by an external GPS module a so called BluetoothGPS receiver for non GPS enabled phones. It is a Swedish company based in Stockholm.

Wayfinder Logo

Wayfinder Screenshot on a Nokia 6680.

The product Navigator sells for about 149 euros for a continent (Europe or North America) or 99 euros for a single European country. Another product (still in beta) called Wayfinder Earth (not to be confused with Google Earth) uses the same maps and allows navigation (Wayfinder Earth GPS) and routing (Wayfinder Earth Guide) for only 14.90 and 4.95 euros a year. But it lacks the voice guided navigation from the Wayfinder Navigator product but is yet good for most navigation purposes. Unknown is however whether this product will go up in prices when the final version is released. It offers moving maps and several points of interest, setting Favorites and address search. It shows GPS information such as speed, position and heading as well. The TomTom product however appears to be more user friendly. A user can try it out by downloading a 5 day trial version and then if she/he likes it register it. A disadvantage is that registration of the product is somewhat cumbersome, it is not possible on a 'normal' web browser (which should be far easier as text input on most phones is cumbersome). The maps are downloaded from internet on the fly so it requires a GPRS/UMTS connection. But maps are cached on the phone memory or memorycard. According to the site, maps can even downloaded from the site and stored on the phone, but user registration on mywayfinder is cunbersome. Data traffic over mobile internet is not so much, half an hour navigating costs about 200 kb of data or only 8 kb in the so called Guide wiev and is far better than e.g. MGMaps. On the other hand, MGMaps offers Google Maps images and maps. Wayfinder launched the Wayfinder SpeedAlert application in December 2006. The application runs on Java and Symbian 3rd edition only. It warns the user of 15.000 speed cameras around Europe as well as when exceeded a manually set speed limit.