How To Never Get Lost Again

Here's the mission: Get around a new town without getting lost and without having to stop and ask anyone for directions. It'll save your sanity, and potentially the relationship with your significant other.

You already have everything you need close at hand: Your phone and your car.

Get to know your navigation system

Is it voice controlled? Will it connect to your phone? Spend a few minutes with the owner's manual for your car to get to know the ins and out of its navigation system. It'll be worth your time in the long run. If you know in advance what words your navigation will accept on the go and which ones send it back for "recalculating" you'll be grateful you did. Figuring it out on the side of a long, lonely road is never a good idea.

Put a great GPS app on your phone

PCMag.com recommends these GPS apps on your phone to make sure you're always in the know about where you are and where you're going. The list includes Google Maps, Waze, HereRoutes, InMap, ScoutGPS, AppleMaps, and Mapquest.

Whether you're looking for a detailed map or turn-by-turn directions, these apps will keep you covered. The best thing? Most of them are free.

Add GPS to your car

New cars, and upscale rides include them in the dashboard, but for the rest of us navigation systems have to be portable. "The standalone portable navigation device (PND) is far from dead," according to C/Net.

Among the devices it recommends, the Garmin Nuvi 3597 is ranked at the top for its premium design and "one of the best interfaces in the business." Magellan SmartGPS, TomTomGOLive, Garmin Nuvi Essentials, and TomTom Via 1535 round out the list. They're priced from $35 to $168.

"Today's PNDs sport more features than ever to help you get from point A to point B quickly and safely--features such as audible driving directions with text-to-speech (TTS), spoken street names, real-time traffic updates, Internet connectivity for points-of-interest search, and large easy-to-read screens, to name a few," C/Net says.