Cover your sat-nav’s ears – Skobbler brings GPS navigation to Anfroid for free
Free satellite navigation is still a new concept, and one which has sat-nav manufacturers cowering in the corner. Not content with eating into the PMP, camera and gaming market, your Android handset can now be a fully fledged sat nav, courtesy of Skobbler GPS Navigation.
Available for Android 1.6 and above, downloading all files for the app takes a few minutes, but once you are up and running you can pretty much start being guided straight away. There is the option to register your device – this is so you can access the Skobbler website and download route options – but this can be skipped.
On our test, we found that Skobbler doesn’t quite have all UK postcodes in its database, so if you want to get anywhere fast you need to know full addresses. The sat nav experience is decent, though, giving you a 3D route and a notification in the left-hand corner regarding which turn you have to take next.
Although Skobbler uses Open Street Maps, they are constantly updatable and we didn’t find any roads which should/shouldn’t have been there. If you do find something out of place, though, all you need to do is click the bug icon and report it.
We may not have found bugs, but there were a number of times when we simply couldn’t access information on the app or it just forced close on us.
These rough edges aside, Skobbler is an app which does a more-than passable job of getting you to A to B – and for free, which is fantastic considering the amount of functionality that’s on offer.
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