Vodafone Live users get directions

Vodafone Live has just announced a tie-in with the MapWay direction system from M-Spatial (who happen to be based just round the corner).

This is one of the most obvious location-based mobile services, and I’m a little surprised that no-one has rolled anything out before now. From the demo on their website, it looks like a pretty decent service, and as user-friendly as a WAP-based service can be ;-)

Looks like you can either enter your location, or choose “from here” as the starting point (not clear how it works out where you are, but definitely a useful, user-friendly feature :-) and then enter where you want to go to, and then it shows you a sequence of maps to guide you to your destination. And they claim it’s aware of train/tube stations too (what about bus routes?).

I don’t know how often I’d use the service, mainly because I know my way round Cambridge pretty well, but this would’ve been a godsend when I was trying to find the Thai restaurant for a date I had in central London last Christmas time. Presumably they could extend it to offer nearby restaurants or pubs, so you could get directions for somewhere to eat without having to know anything about the area you were in.

I hope there’s a companion website that lets you edit your “My Places” list. Then, in the Thai restaurant example, I could enter that using a full-size keyboard, on a PC where I can search on www.yell.co.uk for the address… as it would be soooo much easier, and then just pick it from a list if (/when) I get lost en route.