Turn Your Cell Phone into a Free GPS
Written by Jan Visser on February 18, 2008. Leave a Comment on this Post.
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If Santa skipped your home this year and you didn’t get that fancy schmancy GPS toy you wanted, here’s a quick fix for you.
Dial Directions is a popular, free voice-activated phone service that is now available across the US.
Anyone with a cell phone can just call, request Mapquest directions to any location, address or event and receive them by text message.
On your way to a customer and can’t find the address? Check. Looking for the closest Starbucks to get your daily coffee fix? Got that too.
Another great idea is to register your tradeshow or customer seminar with Dial Directions and you can tell people to just call DIR-ECT-IONS (347-328-4667) - say the name of the event and receive instant directions. You can also easily put a note to call Dial Directions on invitations and flyers.
No fancy phone, data plan or software download required. It’s free, instant and pretty darn cool.
Give Dial Directions a try and let us know what you think.
For another way to put your cellphone to work -don’t miss our post about using your camera phone as a sales tool.
Another option is from Google. It won’t work with every cell - you need a browser, but Google Maps 2.0 uses cell towers to calculate your location by triangulation. http://www.google.com/gmm/index.html
Yep, the iPhone has a nice implementation of that as well. The only downfall, you need an iPhone (or if you needed one more reason to get one…) - the nice thing about this service is that it works with virtually every phone. I tried is this weekend, it works like a champ.
Jan - Thank you for sharing Dial Directions with your readers. Road warriers from pharma sales to real estate agents have dialed D-I-R-E-C-T-I-O-N-S (347-328-4667) for navigation assistance. They find it handy for all the reasons you noted: it’s available on all cell phones, free, and easy to use. They’ve even turned their clients to our service. We’d welcome your and your readers’ feedback on the service.
Tuyen, no problem. It’s a nice little tool, I love using it. Now, the only beef I would have with it so far is that long directions are split over multiple text messages. It may be technically necessary, but it does make it harder to follow.