I believe the following to be of exceptional value to members of this forum and especially to there family.

A few months ago Verizon made it possible for the average cell phone owner to have GPS assisted text-to-voice(voice turn-by-turn) navagation and POI'S(points of interest) without a "smart phone",or any additional equipment, downloading maps,etc. A bonus is your exact location is known with every 911 call. The 911 locater costs nothing and the GPS navagation can be used if and when uou need it and you only pay for it if it is used. The fee is $9.99 month or $2.99 per 24 hour day; however if your decide to take it for a month when you vacation and cancel after 2 weeks, they will pro-rate the bill. Amost every cell phone offered by Verizon now has this feature.

As one who has used text-to-voice navagation & poi's for about 5 years in my vehicles and three years on my smart phones, I am very much impressed with the mapping source and poi's used by Verizon.......and no, I don't own any Verizon stock!

GPS has been in every phone for 911 location use for a few years now. Verizon's navigation service only works if you have a cell phone signal though since it sends the location back to the provider to look up the map. I'm trying to find a phone which will let me use its GPS without a cell signal, just simple latitude and longitude will be fine.

EUGENE:
Your comment that usable GPS has been in every phone for years is simply not accurate.

To get what you say you want, today, you need to purchase one of the new unlocked high CPU smartphones or PDA's that have a quality GPS receiver built-in, plus a 2/4 gig memory card, usually plus the (correct for your purpose & area) mapping software...or put all this together yourself. In any case to get a top preforming unit you need to be prepared to spend from $700 to $1000. That my friend is why the Verizon unit is such a wonderful tool and bargin for the average Joe.

I think there is some confusion over the different technologies. GPS is different from the service offered by Verizon. It has now been about 5 years since all cellular phone providers have been forced to record the geographical position of any cell phone when a call is made within their network. It does this by picking up the microwave radio transmission from the phone to multiple towers, computes the time delays for each tower then performs a calculation to compute the geographical position of that radio transmission (the computation takes into account the geographical position of each tower and the geographic radio transmission mapping). Accuracy was initially about 100m in the year 2000. As the computational models improved accuracy has improved to around 10-20m within the cell network. Every cellular service provider has the ability to record every call made together with the geographical position of that call in the US and is mandated by law to do so. Everyones cell phone in the US and in the UK has the ability to be tracked and monitored. I always have a little chuckle at the terrorist in the TV show '24' using a cell phone to carry out his dastardly plan. Cell phone networks also have other abilities too. Stealth Aircraft can be easily detected as the aircraft passes over the cell network from the hundreds of cell towers each working as RADARs. The service offered by Verizon will only work within the Verizon cell network. GPS uses a network of Satellites that circle the planet. GPS works by the box of electronics in your hand doing the positional computation from the Satellite broadcast transmissions. The Verizon systems works the opposite way around and Verizon can track your every movement within the cell network. Verison holds this positional information, not the cell phone itself. The GPS system cannot do this, it cannot track your position. Most people who own cell phones are unaware that their cell phone can be tracked geographically which is why some assume there is something called a GPS circuit and antenna built into their phone. The phone companies don't want to correct that incorrect notion.

Actually its useless since you have to have a connection. 50% of the places I drive my phone falls back on analog which will be gone after Feb 08. Its just another overprices subscription like downloading ringtones and junk like that. I want a real GPS in my phone to help justify carrying it, I don't want to have to subscribe to a service.

And I didn't say useable GPS, I said GPS, its been there for years and Verizons navigator service has been around for 2-3 years now as well, but as described above its not all that useable.