As many of us know, Yahoo! has a pretty decent maps application, which supports routing in many regions on the desktop. Yes, you can even get routing by text for major cities in a country like India without having to shell out any extra dough. Well, we were tearing our hair apart at the fact that Google Maps, for all its considerable virtues, would just not show us even the most basic route (say, from the city centre to the international airport), then the thought struck us that after all, the iPhone avatar of Safari was supposed to be every bit as good as a desktop browser (provided no Flash was  involved on the site). So, if we could plot a route on Yahoo! Maps on the desktop, well, there was no earthly reason why we could not do so on our trusty iPhones. 

So, without further ado, we headed out to http://in.maps.yahoo.com on our iPhones. Up popped the Indian map, with different viewing options (map, satellite, hybrid, etc.), but we were most interested in the tab at the top labelled “Get Directions.” Tapping on it gave us the option of entering the starting point and the destination (in terms of street, locality and city name). We entered “India Gate, Delhi” and “Indira Gandhi International Airport, Delhi” and tapped the “Search” Button. And lo and behold, the site served up detailed as well as summarised tur-by-turn route details in text, with information about the distance, the travelling time and in some cases, even the approximate auto fare between the two places. For good measure, one could even text these directions to any mobile phone number free of charge., and also mail the map with the route outlined to acquaintances who are mired in the city’s streets. Neato!

Mind you, this method is far from perfect. The service is a bit iffy. We were told a few times that “this service is not currently available” And to “please try later.” Sometimes the map also refused to load completely. At yet other times, it simply seemed to take too long to work out the route. However, some bloody minded tapping finally allowed us to have our way…and route too! At no cost whatsoever (apart from that of the data transferred, which does not really bother us “unlimited GPRS” connection types).

Not surprisingly, we have bookmarked the site and have a link on our home screens. Worth a go definitely if you need to find your way around town, although GPS fanatics will scoff at the fact that you cannot pinpoint your own location on it! Still, it’s free. And it works most of the time. We rest our case.