Free Turn-by-Turn Voice Navigation Comes to the iPhone

Suppose you're on a business trip to a strange city, and you can pay $15/day for GPS in the rental car -- or get it for free on your iPhone. Which do you choose? Clearly, unless the iPhone sends electric shocks up your arm every time you use it, you'll want to go with the free solution. Until recently, though, that wasn't really an option. Sure, you could pay for GPS guidance on your iPhone, but you'd have to get an Android for free GPS. No more.

Free voice-guided navigation has come to the iPhone via an unlikely source: also-ran mapping service MapQuest. Recently, MapQuest added turn-by-turn voice guidance to its free MapQuest 4 Mobile.

The program is still not quite what you might hope for in a full-featured navigation package. You don't get real-time tracking of your position in a bird's eye view of the route, for example. But you definitely get voice guidance all along your route, and if you have no other choice (i.e., you don't already subscribe to a program like MotionX's GPS Drive), then it's perfectly serviceable. In fact, it works perfectly well.

I should also point out that there are two MapQuest apps in the iPhone App Store. Don't be confused by the presence of MapQuest Navigator, which is a 99 cent app which also provides voice guidance (and a host of other traditional navigation features). But Navigator requires an ongoing subscription.

MapQuest 4 Mobile is completely free, and handy in a pinch.