Written by Russ Crandall | 28 October 2011

I may have stumbled upon my favorite iPhone app of the year. You see, lately I've been looking for a good GPS iPhone app; my Garmin is now three years old, and doesn't have lifetime maps, so it's becoming increasingly useless - in fact, it now consistently tells me the wrong way to go more often than not. Initially, I thought I would upgrade and get a better GPS, but it's also annoying to carry around a bunch of gadgets when my phone does so much already. Hell, it's already replaced my iPod (for the most part), Nintendo DS, guitar tuner, notepad, alarm clock, camera, and TV remote - why shouldn't it replace my GPS, too? Garmin sells a GPS iPhone app, but it's $40, over 1GB in size, and as far as I can tell it doesn't have map updates, either.

Enter Waze. It's a free app, which comes with fully featured turn-by-turn GPS navigation, real-time traffic reporting and police speed traps (user-generated), alternative routes, and a bunch of social incentives to keep people generating the traffic tips. It's also available on Android and Blackberry.

For me, it's a perfectly practical app: I plug my iPhone into my car stereo, and the voice prompts will dim my music down a bit and tell me where and when to turn. It will reroute me if it knows there's traffic ahead, but it also adjusts itself based on my traffic patterns - if I take a certain route to work every day, it will learn my preferences. You can adjust how often it gives you voice prompts as well. Every morning, I turn it on and it calculates the fastest way for me to get to work based on current traffic patterns, which saves me time every single day.

Being that the app is only 18MB in size, it uses your cell phone data plan to stream its maps and traffic data, and initially I was afraid that it was going to eat up my data plan. Turns out I have nothing to fear - on a 45-minute trip it only uses about 1MB of cell phone data.

The only bad thing I can say about the app is that I had a hard time figuring out how to save my current location (you just hold your finger down on the location on your map to save it). I should also mention that the reason it works so well for me is that I have my iPhone plugged directly into my stereo; it'd probably be annoying to have to listen to it through the iPhone's internal speaker. Still, I couldn't be happier with this free app, and I would say it's a necessary part of any smartphone. Check out Waze.com for more info and some informative video tutorials.

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