Best Free Gps Downloads For A Phone
Keeping your children and grandchildren safe is priority number one. Thanks to smartphones, tablets and the internet, there are many potential threats to them you might not see coming. They could be using one of these dangerous apps or be in contact with an online predator and you wouldn’t know.
SpeedView uses the phone's built-in GPS system to show your current, maximum and average speed, as well as direction, total distance and time traveled. Suitable for running, car driving, biking or hiking. GPS Tracker: How to track a cell phone location What is GPS Tracker. GPS is an abbreviation used for Global Positioning System. It’s a technique to find out the actual position of any person or entity. It can be placed in the vehicle, mobile phones, or on any particular GPS device.
That’s why we encourage parents to talk to kids before they use technology and set clear rules.
Not sure where to start? Check out Kim’s free tech safety contract. Establish rules on screen time, sharing photos, meeting people online and parental access to phones, tablets and computers. Click or tap here to download the technology contract for parents and children.
- Feb 07, 2018 The project allows you to track cell phones periodically. For instance, every minute or every five minutes. With Google Map Gps Cell Phone Tracker, you can watch the cell phone being tracked in real time and you can store and reload routes easily. With Google Map Gps Cell Phone Tracker, you have the choice of two server stacks.
- Jun 06, 2018 Which are the best free golf GPS apps for your iPhone or Android device? We could all do with a bit of help out on the course and while there some fantastic GPS devices on the market, they can be quite expensive. There are dozens of free apps available which will use the GPS location from your phone.
How to protect children online and in the real world
Ideally, you want to be able to peek in on what your children are doing no matter where they are. There are several companies that make remote spy software, including mSpy, FlexiSPY and more.
However, those will set you back $30 or more for the spying app. We’ve found one that’s free and works on up to five phones, so you can keep tabs on all your kids or grandkids.
The free app is called Phone Tracker from Spy Phone Labs, and it gives you detailed information about any phone or tablet you put it on. We have a link for you to download it later in this post.
Here’s a video that tells you more about it.
The Phone Tracker app uses GPS to track a phone’s location, gives you a full log of all calls sent and received, and even shows you text messages and web activity. This information is available online after you create a free account. Not bad for a free app that isn’t too difficult to install.
Once it’s installed, open the app, set up an account name and password, give the phone a nickname and you’re done.
To monitor multiple gadgets with the same account, just install the app on each gadget to monitor and use the same account name and password you used for the first one. They’ll all show up when you log in online at Phone Tracker. Give it about 30 minutes after installing the app for the data to start appearing.
Phone Tracker is free and has versions available for both Android and Apple. However, installing spy apps on iOS is no picnic.
To get around legal problems, Phone Tracker puts an icon on the gadget’s home screen and fires off a notification every 12 hours telling the person they’re being monitored.
That’s actually a good thing in most situations, but kids are resourceful. If they know they’re being watched, they can find ways around the app. So, either tell them you’re putting it on there and you expect them to leave it alone or go for a paid app that’s completely hidden.
To install the app, you will need access to the phone or tablet. Then go to Google Play or iTunes, find the Phone Tracker app and tap “Install.”
Tap or click here to download the free app for iOS. Tap or click here to download the free app for Android.
Bonus tip: Another way to track your child’s phone
Not ready to install a new app? Here’s a simple way to track a phone’s location, no download required.
iPhones running iOS 12 can continuously send location information to another iPhone, iPad or Mac computer. On the phone you wish to track, go to Messages and find the thread of messages they’ve had with you. In the upper-right corner, touch the “Information” icon, which looks like a lowercase I.
Tap “Send My Current Location” to instantly send a map of the phone’s current location, one time only. Or just below it, hit “Share My Location,” which will continuously send the phone’s location to your Apple gadget.
To see the phone’s location, go to your Messages app and find your child’s contact. Tap the “Information” icon and a map will display the phone’s location.
Note that your child can easily turn off this location sharing anytime, but perhaps a firm conversation about the consequences of doing so might encourage him or her to leave it on. (Note: These features will also work for your Apple gadgets that are running older iOS versions.)
Want to track your child’s Android device? Click or tap here to learn how.
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With a profusion of free and paid GPS map and navigation apps available for the Android OS, which of those free apps offers the best performance and options? In this hands-on review, Brighthand takes a look at five of the top free GPS options: Google Maps Navigation (GMN); Telenav GPS Navigator; GPS Essentials; Loopt; and Waze Social GPS & Live Traffic. We also pick a winner.
Google Maps Navigation (GMN)
If you’ve ever handled an Android device, you’ve probably used Google Maps. Maybe you’ve even used this service to get directions via GPS. Did you know, though, that Google Maps now comes with a full fledged GPS navigation app? The unimaginatively named Google Maps Navigation (GMN) adds lots of features that the regular Google Maps doesn’t offer: a 3D view, voice directions, and automatic route recalculation, for instance.
As with so many things from Google, Google Maps Navigation is still officially in beta, meaning that you use it without any guarantee that it will work quite right. Yet Google is equally famous for betas which work just as well as the final releases of apps from other companies.
GMN is no exception. If has the feel of a fairly well polished nav app, one which is simple but effective. The real strength of GMN can be found in the ability to use Google’s large database of maps in addition to satellite and street-view imagery. Instead of simply telling you that your destination is 400 yards away, GMN will actually give you a street view of where your destination is located as you approach. That way, you can recognize the surroundings.
Also, while GMN is still dependent on online data, it handles caching carefully so that if you lose your data connection, you can continue navigating and even re-route if necessary. Working with GMN offline isn’t as robust and reliable as if you had full maps residing on your device. Yet Google makes a nice attempt here at avoiding the major flaw of online navigation.
Telenav GPS Navigator
Telenav is almost as ubiquitous as Google Maps. Many smartphones come with Telenav preinstalled — although as often as not, the app is hiding under another name, such as AT&T Navigator or Sprint Navigation.
Telenav offers a few more features than Google Maps Navigation, such as multiple route options. However, many of the most advanced capabilities require you to pay extra.
Telenav Premium gives you real time traffic incident reports, as well as warnings for speed limits and traffic cameras, and voice control, but at a cost of $3 a month or $21 a year.
So in the end, the free version ends up looking distinctly lackluster in comparison to the more feature-rich and better performing Google Maps Navigation.
Recently, Telenav has started introducing a new app called “Scout” which is designed to extend the Telenav brand. Scout includes cloud integration for plotting your route on a PC, along with direct integration with some car audio and video equipment. Currently Scout is only available for iPhone, but Telenav plans to release an edition for Android by the end of this year. So stay tuned on that.
GPS Essentials
Gps Tracking For Phones Free
You could be forgiven for thinking of GPS Essentials as “Google Maps Deluxe” at first, as GPS Essentials relies on Google’s mapping data and APIs.
Then, though, it adds a whole new layer of complexity, allowing you to track not just route and speed but also altitude, time, distance, sunrise and moonrise, battery temperature, and target altitude.
While GPS Essentials offers functions which could be useful to anyone, it’s clear that some of the app’s features are expressly targeted at pilots of small aircraft. There’s even a mode to use the phone’s camera and accelerometers to create a kind of “heads up display.”
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When you add all that to basic functions like mapping, navigation, route-finding, and GPS satellite status, you get a package that’s not just very powerful, but incredibly flexible in how you want to apply it.
Most people don’t really need all the kinds of tools that GPS Essentials provides, but if you’re a slightly more advanced user — maybe a hiker, pilot, or astronomer — this app might be exactly what you want.
Loopt
Once you can sort through the marketing hype on Loopt’s Web site and elsewhere, you find that Loopt isn’t purely a mapping app. Instead, I’d call it more of a “geotagging/social networking hybrid.”
This app lets you tag your current location via GPS and make it available to your friends. You can also send short messages to them — such as an invitation to dinner — which are complete with GPS coordinates.
You can see which friends are located where, and you can even get alerts if a friend checks in nearby.
In other words, Loopt is more like a more precise and more directly sociable version of Google Latitude or Foursquare.
Yet unfortunately, for an app which is all about interacting with people, Loopt seems steadfastly determined to make sure as few people as possible are actually using the service.
While boasting about supporting “select phones” on every major carrier, Loopt refuses to support most of the popular available Android smartphones, including recent major releases like the Galaxy Nexus and Droid RAZR MAXX.
If you try to email them about these compatibility issues, you will be ignored.
Gps For Cell Phones Free
Waze Social GPS & Live Traffic
Waze represents an attempt to fuse GPS navigation and user-created content. The lovechild of Google Maps and Pintrest, this app tracks the location of its users. It then uses that information to develop a very accurate live picture of how traffic is flowing.
Users can also report things like accidents, speed traps, road maintenance, traffic jams, and even inaccuracies in the map. Other users will then be alerted as they approach these problem spots. Waze also features auto-rerouting, so that if a traffic jam or accident plays out ahead of you, you’ll automatically be alerted and diverted to a better alternate route.
But wait, you wonder. Back up! Did I just hear “tracks the location of its users”? Yes. While many apps are capable of gathering some location data, Waze is one of the few that literally depends on you to broadcast your location continuously while using it — not just to the software company but also to alert other users so they can see where you are.
For obvious reasons, then, Waze can pose some fairly serious privacy issues. It’s true that you can choose to remain anonymous on the Waze map by not registering for an account. Yet that’s hardly much of a comfort since you’ll still show up on the map. There, anyone can watch your little blip to see where it starts and stops, in which direction you’re heading, and how fast. Also, the app permissions give Waze and its developers access to pretty much anything on your device.
Given that Waze has racked up more than 1 million downloads from Google, clearly a lot of people don’t care about these privacy concerns. Yet some people probably do.
Conclusion
Considering the near universal availability of Google Maps Navigation, it’s hard not to treat GMN as the ideal combination of convenience and thoroughness among free GPS apps. Beyond that, GMN puts in some effort to counteract the biggest weakness of free GPS apps, their dependency on a running internet connection.
So while it’s not perfect, GMN definitely stands out as the best choice for simple GPS navigation. Honorable mention, though, goes to GPS Essentials, an app that provides the next best thing to a GPS-enabled Swiss Army Knife. Great for the power user, GPS Essentials gives you an an almost scary level of customization.
Best Free Gps Downloads For A Phone Number
If you prefer Apple’s smartphone, you should check out our run-down of free iPhone navigation apps. And, in a future article in this GPS series, we’ll examine seven paid GPS apps for Android OS phones.