Below is a guest post by Android developer Nicholas Grimlach AKA PlusMinus
Android finally has a fully audible realtime turn-by-turn Navigation System – called AndNav2.
Its just a public Alpha, but due to the experience gained with AndNav1 on the Android Market it is already in a pretty mature state.
Moreover AndNav2 is free. No monthly costs, no map-pack-upgrades, never! To keep it free the project is contigent on voluntary donations throughout the community – and advertising right inside AndNav2.
AndNav2 supports not only Contacts/POI/Address-Search and many more, but even the recently released free Text2Speech library by Charles L. Chen which will give you fully audible turn-by-turn directions in the style of “In 500 meters turn right into king street”.
Unlike AndNav1, AndNav2 is based on OpenStreetMap-Data, which is a community-based collaborative project for mapping, as what Wikipedia is for common knowledge.
The only drawback of AndNav2 is that it currently is only available for the following countries:
- United Kingdom, Germany, Ireland, France, Denmark, Spain, Switzerland, Italy & Austria
The reason why i.e. the U.S. is not yet covered is due the lack of a powerful enough server although on andnav.org one can find a fundraising-thermometer which could fund a server strong enough for the U.S.
. I would pay just for the chutzpah.
