The idea is to help create a familiar setting for when you’re driving through an unfamiliar city. Or something like that anyway. The first device to boast the feature that is the Uniden TRAX 5000, which hits shelves next week. It’s Sydney and Melbourne only at the moment, but there are plans for Brisbane, Perth, plus Auckland and Wellington in NZ.

I can’t say this particular feature has me ready to upgrade my satnav any time soon. How about you?

From poedgirl’s review, the Sygic app seems to wipe the floor with Navigon, scraping it’s face along the rough bits before dumping what’s left in the nearest waste facility. Everything, from the user interface to the quality of the WhereIs maps over the Navigon’s Navteq ones all seem to end up in favour of the Sygic app.

Little things, like being able to manually set your Home address, are made unnecessarily more difficult by the Navigon app, while the Navteq maps seemed to have a few errors in poedgirl’s testing. Although one of her complaints – that the Navteq maps said her house number didn’t exist – is a problem I face with every mapping software, and is only a minor quibble.

Still, things like user interface are incredibly important for a navigation app, and Navigon’s apparent lack of customisation options seems to hurt it.

If you’re thinking about picking up either app, the review is definitely worth a read.

[ROAPD]

Think about it – how many times have you been driving along listening to your satnav telling you to turn right in 20 metres, only to find that you’ve passed the street already. Either that, or your eyes are glued to passing street signs, hoping for some indication of where to turn.

Getting navigation based on easily identifiable landmarks would make navigation so much easier. When you verbally give somebody directions, you don’t tell them how many metres to turn, you point out what they should look for when they need to turn. This development on WhereIs would offer the same thing…

The problem is that at the moment it’s only for turn by turn directions from WhereIs.com. So no voice directions, just pre-planned routes mapped out online. There are about 170,000 landmarks at the moment, but that will grow as time goes on.

There’s a whole heap of science behind the change, with something about spatial cognitive recognition being used to make directions easier to understand. But regardless, I can’t wait for WhereIs to jump on this in their GPS mapping software. I’d pay for it.

[WhereIs.com]

The app costs $80, so it’s much more expensive than all those fart apps that litter your menu screens, but nowhere near as pricey as a new standalone unit. On the upside, there aren’t any monthly fees or data usage – everything’s included in that price. The maps all come from WhereIs, who provide maps for both Garmin and TomTom, so in that regard you know you’re getting top quality mapping. It’s also got all the standard features like school zones, safety alerts and instant rerouting. It works in both landscape and portrait modes,

General feedback on the app store seems pretty positive as well which is a pretty good indication considering these people forked over 80 big ones before trying it. My only concern would be battery life – but if you can find a decent mounting solution for your car, that could take care of itself.

Has anyone played around with this yet? What are your thoughts?

[Sygic via PC Authority]

Fortunately, yesterday was like the second Christmas Special, and the two announced that they were finally hooking up, with Yellow’s business listings to be available on Google Maps in Australia from 2009.Also announced was that Google’s Adsense ads for search will be available on Sensis sites. The announcement means the end for Sensis’ search function, and potentially for their WhereIs online search as well. But considering that WhereIs powers most of Australia’s satnav devices, it’s highly doubtful they’d be pulling out of mapping altogether.

But how do you get it? Thankfully, getting traffic updates isn’t as tricky a process as you would think, even if you already own a satnav device…If you don’t already own a satnav, the easiest way to get traffic updates is to buy a device that’s ready to go out of the box. Pretty much all of the leading satnav manufacturers are offering traffic-enabled devices, as well as traffic bundles – TomTom for example are offering their standard One unit with a bundled TMC receiver for an extra $100.

If you do already own a satnav, the good news is that you don’t have to buy a new unit. All you need to do is buy a TMC receiver add-on (for about $150), which plugs into the device with a cable you run along the windscreen. Then, you need to update your satnav to the latest version of maps available – for most devices this will be WhereIs v.15. There will be a cost involved here, although some manufacturers offer a free upgrade if you purchased your device within a certain time frame.

Once that’s done, you’re good to go. There aren’t any ongoing fees to get your traffic updates – the subscription lasts as long as the device does, although if you want traffic for Perth and Adelaide (when they go live probably next year), you’ll need to update your maps again.

Telstra just keeps rolling out those extra services to NextG customers. After the QR codes the other week, they’ve backed it up with some location-based software that uses A-GPS to locate where your friends and family are, making stalking your ex-girlfriend monitoring your kids whereabouts incredibly simple.

And once you get past the obvious nefarious uses, there are also some pretty useful practical applications for this. Like if you lose your phone (or it’s stolen), you can use a friend’s phone to locate yours. Or if you’re meeting up with some mates and they’re not answering their phone – you can just use this to find out roughly where they are.

The software itself is a free download, but getting the location of your mates has a fee (of course) – it’s 50 cents for a one-time thing lookup, plus 30 cents to actually receive the location alert. Alternatively, you can pay $2.95 each month and get unlimited searches (although it will still cost you 30 cents for each alert you receive.)

And even though we joked about stalking, you do need to have the person you’re trying to stalk you’re locating to accept your invitation before you can receive their location updates, and that may be kind of hard. I mean, you could always try and do it yourself, but that restraining order just keeps making things difficult, doesn’t it?

[Telstra]