All you Samsung Galaxy S owners have probably noticed the “navigation” icon and tried to run it. Unfortunately Google have only released working versions of this app in certain Countries around the world.

You will be happy to hear then, that our favourite search engine has released a working version of Navigation to South Africa. All you need to do is update your Google maps on your Android enabled phone and you will see that you have full gps navigation with voice. Google navigation currently uses “text to speech” so it sounds like a robot is telling you what to do but hey, it works and it's kind a funny.

I've downloaded a couple different navigation apps on the iPhone as well as on my Galaxy S and Google navigation works just as well as any other out there and the best part, it is not a trial version and you don't need to pay a cent for the app (don't you just love the Google machine). When you use Google navigation, it does use a few kb of data when you are navigating to a new destination but it saves the maps into your phones cache so that you don't have to download the maps again. So in reality, Google navigation is not totally free but the amount of data it uses is so little that it's totally worth using.

What makes Google navigation such an innovation is that it is being rolled out for nearly all of the Android enabled phones. What does this mean? Even lower end phones with Android can run Google navigation. Score!