AT&T Navigator: GPS Maps, Navigation & Traffic

Perhaps that headline is a bit of an exaggeration. The latest update to Telenav’s AT&T Navigator for iPhone doesn’t tell you that you should run red lights, but it does tell you when you definitely shouldn’t. Telenav has just pushed out an update to their turn-by-turn app for the iPhone, AT&T Navigator. One of the big new features, amongst others: Red-light camera alerts.

Sal Dhanani, one of the co-founders of mobile GPS navigation company TeleNav, wants to “bring GPS navigation to the masses through mobile phones.” His company has been pursuing that dream since 1999 when TeleNav was founded. Today, TeleNav is bundled into millions of Sprint phones, and is also available through AT&T (including as an iPhone app) and other carriers. The company just went public in May, it has 900 employees, and its revenues last quarter were $45 million (with healthy net profits of $12...

I’ve been using the AT&T Navigator app for iPhone for a couple of months now. This is a free app, but it requires a $10/month subscription from AT&T (or $70 for an annual subscription). I’m not going to belabor the GPS functions too much in this review: it’s almost the year 2010, and the global positioning system has been used to provide turn-by-turn directions for long enough now that any GPS device or application being reviewed should do that basic job. Instead, I’m going to examine how useful a GPS f...