The market in GPS devices offering various Sat Navs which give people turn-by-turn directions has been reacting dramatically to the news that Google will be offering the same functionality for free. Google have developed a live Sat Nav application for mobile phones and the forthcoming Motorola Droid will be the first phone to use the new app. Similar apps have traditionally been quite costly but Google have been developing their amazing free maps application on the web for quite some time and this was their next logical step.

The news has had an instant impact on the big GPS companies and both Garmin and TomTom suffered drops in share price. For Garmin it was almost 20% while TomTom’s drop was closer to 10%. This is terrific news for consumers and it is probably about time the market had a shake up. Mobile phones are becoming more and more diverse in terms of functionality and the Droid also looks set to be a real contender for the iPhone.

Just because you paid a lot of money on your GPS navigator this doesn’t mean you are going to get to your destination (safe). To make the story short here is what happened to a truck driver that followed the instructions and got stuck on a “tractors only” road on Wednesday.

He truck was carrying timber from north Wales to Birmingham and managed to block the track at Halton in Wrexham county

“He knocked down branches on the way and damaged trees and is now well and truly stuck.”

The result is, farmer Margaret Evans became very sad because the truck stuck in her farm lane and she now has to use a two miles longer road to get to that particular part of her land.

The company that owns the truck, Maxi Haulage Ltd from Ayrshire, announced that the don’t provide sat-navigation on their vehicles, but the drivers use their own. More on that matter there was a big sign saying that the track was not suitable to heavy goods vehicles (HGV). How was the GPS navigator supposed to know it?

You’d better trust your own instincts, too, not just your GPS.

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