For someone who spent the formative years of his youth reading maps in the Scouts, I have an unnerving ability to get lost. But so far – and this is especially inscrutable for a gadget freak – I have resisted the lure of satellite navigation. I just didn’t want to have to manage *yet another device* when a map and my innate sense of direction seemed generally adequate.

But a combination of my iPhone, an affordable satnav app called CoPilot Live, and a demand from the Significant Other to end unintended diversions – and I have an opportunity to see what this GPS driving business is all about.

So having ditched the maps for CoPilot Live, did my iPhone get me from A to B?

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[Please welcome Jane Sales as a new reviewer. Jane previously wrote Symbian OS Internals, and is currently working on something location-specific for the iPhone.]

Twitter is becoming a platform, and GeoTweeter is the latest proof of that. It’s the new iPhone app from Schmap, the creators of the iPhone-friendly interactive travel guides and the Schmap.me location sharing service, and it’s a free download from the App Store.
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This week’s Carnival of the Mobilists is yet again chock full of excellent writing, plus another contribution from All About iPhone. There are stats galore, especially relating to mobile data usage from Tomi Ahohen and Chetan Sharma.

But the post of the week, and also my favourite read, was from Andrew Grill of London Calling. He reports on his “Eureka moment” with Twitter + mobile + search. There is a lot going on in the mobile location services space at the moment. We’ll also have article up on that topic soon, from someone working on an iPhone location app.

Read the Carnival at Ubiquitous Thoughts.

The sheer usefulness of finding ‘stuff around you’ has meant the emergence of several pretenders, despite the ubiquitous presence of Google Maps itself. AroundMe (at first commercial, but now free) and Vicinity (always free) are also well established now, but in the interests of keeping things simple (and reducing the clutter slightly on your application screens), the question remains ‘Is it worth looking things up in these ‘extra’ solutions?’

With this in mind, I put all three to the same tests. Read on.

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