November 19, 2009 -- My wife bought me a Garmin GPS for Christmas last year. After showing her Google Navigation on my G1, she asked if her gift is obsolete. Sorry to say but, for anything but long-distance treks, Google's Navigation is good enough.

I've been using Google Maps Navigation on an HTC G1, which is not the higher-powered, bigger-screened Droid it was designed for. That said, Navigation has delivered that "I'm living in the future" feeling that makes you start mentally marking down the margin you paid for your gadgets. It combines a slew of services Google has recently refined—overhead maps and street-level images, voice recognition, local searches with plain English queries, and traffic data from real drivers—and presents them in an interface that's surprisingly inviting and useful, given Google's tendency for the Hey It Works school of design. More than anything, though, it's free, the data it serves up is free, and it'll always remain up to date for free.