February 11, 2009 While TomTom has had a functional turn-by-turn GPS application working in the lab since June last year, the "complicated issues" preventing a launch that Apple mentioned a couple of weeks later obviously haven't been sorted out - but that hasn't stopped the xGPS team from bringing turn-by-turn to the iPhone and iPod touch in the form of a jailbreak app.
The app has been around for a while, but the upcoming 1.2 update is the first to add a voice engine in order to bring the oft asked for turn-by-turn functionality. You can even use external GPS units to add the capability to a first-gen iPhone or iPod touch.
If you're driving in areas with flaky or no data coverage, you can download and cache an area of the map before you head off. Presumably this works over Wi-Fi for those of you with prohibitively expensive data charges or tiny data allowances.
Interested parties (that's probably all of you) will be able to find xGPS 1.2 at the MMi Cydia repo later this month, possibly as early as February 20. If you need to jailbreak your phone first, check out PwnageTool or QuickPwn - safely ignoring the caveat regarding the 3G unlock, as Dev-Team changed their minds on that one with the release of yellowsn0w, the 3G unlock software.
One thing is for sure - Apple needs to take a good, hard look at whatever stopped "legit" developers bringing desirable, valuable functionality to the App Store table before hackers brought it to Cydia...for free.
