You're in a rental car lost in a strange city with an inadequate or no map. What do you do? Do you ask someone for directions or drive around aimlessly hoping to spot a landmark you remember? Or do you pull out your mobile phone and enter the cross streets of the where you are and the address that you are looking for and receive turn by turn directions that speed to you destination? This review covers several mobile web sites that promise to provide you with driving directions wherever you are. Most of these sites are US only but similar sites exist around the world. For my tests I entered the same starting and ending points into each application. I used a couple of different test routes, one involving a short trip on local streets and the other a longer trip between two cities requiring a combination of surface streets and freeway.
I found few differences in the directions themselves - all the sites returned accurate directions for my test routes. This is not surprising as these sites all get their data from either NavTeq or TeleAtlas the two market leaders in digital mapping data. There were, however major differences in usability and features.
Yahoo has both WAP1 (wml) and WAP2 (xhtml-mp) driving directions sites with completely different interfaces. There doesn't seem to be any way to force Yahoo to render one version or the other, it's all dependent on browser detection. Most phones, even Series 60 and UIQ smartphones get the wml version. The xhtml version seems to only be sent to devices running the Palm or Microsoft operating systems, including MS Smartphones like the T-Mobile SDA.
The WAP1 edition of Yahoo Driving Directions uses a wizard interface which walks you through entering an address step by step. First you chose how you want to enter your address (second image). The first two options, (Zip code, City/State) give you general directions to or from the center of a city or zip code. Airport takes a 3-letter code like SFO or LAX. In addition to entering an address, you can pick one from your Yahoo address Book or from your Yahoo Maps Favorite Locations. The Favorite Locations feature appears broken - on my phone as well as the Nokia and Openwave emulators I get a compile error trying to open the list of favorites and the W3c Validator reports that the xml is not well formed.
Probably the best feature of Yahoo is that it remembers the last few locations that you have 
entered and lets you reuse them. If you choose to enter a new address the wizard asks you if you want to enter a zip code or a state. If you enter a zip code, you don't need to enter a city and state. For entering states you have a choice of typing the two character USPS state abbreviation or choosing the state from a list. To keep the list manageable, you first have to choose from "ABC", "DEF", etc. Once the state is selected, you again have a choice of typing the city name or picking it from a list. The list option doesn't work very well for San Francisco as the list of California cities starting with "S" goes on and on for over a dozen screens. In this case, typing the city name is much easier. You don't have to type the whole name either. Yahoo will recognize the first few letters of a city name as long as it's unambiguous when combined with the street address. It also recognizes common abbreviations such as "SF" for San Francisco. As for the driving directions themselves, they are simple, clear turn by turn directions. There are no maps. The UI is generally quite intuitive and easy to use - but only on Openwave Browsers!. The problem is that Yahoo uses wml "do" tags for navigation. Openwave browsers bind do's to the phone's soft keys where they are easy to find. On Nokia, AU, Netfront, Motorola and all the other wml browsers I've seen, "do"'s are hidden one or more levels deep in a submenu launched from the left soft key. So after you enter a street address, if your phone has an Openwave browser, you just press the left soft key which is labeled 'OK'. But on a Nokia 6230, for example, you are trapped on the first text input screen unless you can figure out that you must first choose the left soft-key, labeled 'Options', which brings 
up a menu where you choose 'Shortcuts' which leads to another submenu where you finally choose 'OK'. Very ugly and I'm sure many users can't figure out how to get past the first screen. I could never understand why the other browser vendors didn't just adopt Openwave's superior way of handling "do" tags, but they didn't, which means mobile web designers have a responsibility to make their screens as usable as possible on all devices. Yahoo needs to do browser detection and send non-Openwave browsers a page where instead of OK being a "do", it's a link.
The WAP2 version of Yahoo mobile driving directions dispenses with the Wizard interface and provides a single plain text address input box where you enter street address, city/state or zip. It seems quite forgiving in what it accepts, ignoring case and punctuation and
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posted by Dennis Bournique
May 31, 2006 @ 7:45 pm
7 View Comments
