Telenav’s Scout for iPhone is a pretty capable personal navigator that gives you voice-guided turn-by-turn directions, access to local information and all the other features you expect from a GPS app. Today, the company is launching a major update to the app that focuses on bringing more social features to Scout.
You can now, for example, share your estimated time of arrival with your friends and family with just one click. These reports, by the way, can also be automated, so that, as the Scout team notes, you can “notify significant others or their childcare each day when they have left and when they should arrive.” The time of arrival, of course, is based on real-time traffic data.
Scout plans to go a bit further than this, though. “Coming soon, we will also make it possible for people to share their full route with friends and family as well as ongoing updates on their ETA,” Dariusz Paczuski, general manager of Scout at Telenav said in a canned statement today. “This will be helpful if you’re stuck in abnormally heavy traffic, for example.”
The other interesting new feature of Scout for iPhone is that you can send your location to your friends via text, email or Facebook message and they will be able to get free voice-guided GPS navigation from Scout on their smartphones (iOS, Android and Windows Phone) without having to download the app. Instead, Scout will run in the browser, using the services HTML5 GPS navigation service.