Freedom in the era of personal sat-navs

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In recent years I've had several occasions when I've had to drive to pick something up or drop someone off (and so on) deep in the heart of a city that I've never been to before. And I've managed it with minimal fear and dread.

You see, I've a pathological fear of unknown and complex city layouts - one way streets, four-lane-wide junctions, and so on. Plus so, so much traffic. And back in the 1980s, when I learned to drive, through the 1990s and through most of the 2000s, this was the status quo. I just wouldn't dare drive into such an environment, even with a passenger with 'road atlas' and 'A-Z' street map. Way too stressful and possibly dangerous.

The early 2000s saw a variety of 'mapping' systems, including my own Mapper software, for Psion palmtops and Nokia communicators, then commercial software such as Autoroute Express and Sygic, but it was Nokia buying up Smart2Go in 2007 and rebranding it Nokia Maps and available to all of its smartphone (S60) users for free that really shook up the apple cart. Google followed suit with a Java-based Maps program, which then became native on all mobile platforms around 2010 - and finally Apple Maps five years later.

 

The upshot is that, for at least a decade, anyone with a smartphone has had free, real time satellite navigation in their pocket. 

This has utterly transformed my view of driving and given me freedoms I couldn't have dreamt of even 20 years ago. I can now plug in any specific address anywhere in the country and just start driving. Not only will I be guided to the exact destination lane by lane, turn by turn, I'll get the benefit of cloud-based traffic knowledge to make sure the route is continually optimised and adjusted.

It's all about confidence. And it's a super example of how technology really can change our lives for the better. It's not putting anyone out of a job, it's not making me lazy, anything like that. It just adds to life and adds an extra dimension.

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Comments

Gabriel said…
Totally right - great example of a transformative piece of technology that solves a new 'problem' so well that you almost wonder how we ever lived without it!
9:50 PM
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