Navfree lands for Android, brings crowdsourced offline voice-guided navigation to many places

Navree has been available on iOS devices for a while, and it recently landed on Android, too. The software replicates Nokia Drive somewhat, in the sense that it offers free offline voice-guided navigation.

The difference is in maps - Navfree relies on the crowdsourced project OpenStreetMap, which is described as the Wikipedia for GPS navigation. With more than two 3.7 million members of the project, Navfree allows them to enter map comments and fixes at navmii.com, which are further used to enhance the experience that users are already pretty content with.

For places with free maps the navigation software offers routing almost on par with dedicated satnav solutions like TomTom or Garmin, with somewhat poorer functionality, but all basics are there and you can't beat free.

There is currently a handful of countries inside for which you can get free maps, like the major ones in Europe, but the US is notably missing, while it is present in the iOS version, so we hope it will be released soon, since Google Maps only allows you so much offline caching before you need to use your data connection again. If you have to go to France or UK, though, this thing will save you a boatload of the outrageous roaming data fees the US carriers are charging.

source: Navfree (Android Market)