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With Android 1.6, Google Maps include a turn-by-turn navigation that uses Googles own map material. This part of our X(10)-mas in New York story gives you some impressions of this new feature running on Sony Ericsson's Xperia X10.

Google Navigation is available on Android 1.6 powered mobile phones, and it is currently limited to the United States only. We are assuming though that sooner or later, it will also become available in other countries. Also, this is not a fully fledged review of the application, since we did not use it in a car. It is supposed to give you impressions on some of the possibilities of the app on the beautiful, large 4 inch screen of the Xperia X10.

Before we get hands on, a few bullet points on Google Navigation's features:

• Turn by turn GPS navigation with voice guide
• All map content is being pulled from the internet as it is used. This means always up to date maps, but also potentially high data volume consumation.
• Destinations and Points of Interests can be searched for via keyboard input, or via voice input in english. Think of googling your destination rather than inputting a fix address as you would do it with traditional navigation systems.
• Different layers (satelite view, Street View, real time traffic information etc.) can be put on top of the navigation route
• Last but not least: Google Navigation is free (except of course for the fees that your network operator might charge you for the data traffic that gets generated)

As you might have seen in our last episode of this series, I was spending some time on Times Square and then moved over to the Rockefeller Center. A good opportunity to check out Google Navigation, although I was not travelling by car. You will see in the following video that I used another feature of Google Maps, called 'Directions'. This showed me how to get from A to B on my own feet - a feature that comes in very handy, especially if you are in a foreign city ;)

Enough talking, let's move over to the video!

That's it for today's episode, in the next part we will shed some light on another really cool app called 'Wikitude', a representative of the so called 'augmented reality applications'. Until then:

MERRY CHRISTMAS EVERYONE!