Looking for a GPS? Look no farther than your pocket.

With Christmas coming on, I had the idea that I could ask for a nice GPS to use in my car. My wife LeeAnne suggested I pick one out myself because I can be a bit picky when it comes to gadgets. So in my typical way, I set off to learn everything there is to know about the devices.

I read about and tried a lot of units. To my surprise, I decided to go with the Verizon Navigator GPS product which works on my phone, a RAZR. I compared it to the Acura MDX factory Navigation and, thanks to a loan from Nic, a Garmin StreetPilot 2620. I also compared the directions of all of these against Mapquest and Yahoo Maps.

I have a lot of experience with the Acura GPS since LeeAnne has one in her MDX. It has some flaws such as a confusing POI (point of interest) database but overall, it is really nice. For a portable unit, I was looking for…

• First and foremost: good directions
• Form factor. I want something small that won’t get in the way on the dashboard of my car. I also want to be able to take it on trips and that means it should be fairly flat like the very nice Garmin Nuvi.
• Next is cost. Not more than $350. There are a lot of nice units in that price range.
• Next are features such as speaking street names, “follow me” maps and good POI search.

So here’s what I found.

According to my research here, Navteq is the best map solution for the US. If having good directions is a priority, you need Navteq maps. Garmin, Magellan, and our Acura use Navteq.

Overall, Garmin has the best portable and in car solutions. Their routing is very good and ease of use is top notch. If money were no object, I would get the Garmin Nuvi 660.

The Garmin 2620 was state of the art for consumer GPS a year or two ago. This is a very powerful and highly customizable unit. A little larger than I like so it would be a bear to take in carry-on baggage. I believe the power cord is permanently attached so I wouldn’t be able use an AC cord, cut the end off and hard-wire it to the power in my car. The speaker is built into the power cord.

The 2620 compares well to the Acura GPS. Of course it is hard to beat the convenience of a built in unit for voice over the internal stereo, large screen, built in buttons, and so on. But the 2620 is very fast to calculate routes and gave similar directions.

When it came to calculating accurate directions, only the Verizon Navigator worked as I expected. I compared five routes that I travel on a regular basis. Verizon got all five perfect! All others sent me five minutes or more farther. It has incredible features for a phone based GPS. It has live updating maps (follow-me), speaks street names and the best POI search of any I tried.

The Verizon service costs $3 per day or $10 per month. There are some advantages of a service like this that you may not realize unless you own a GPS. One of them is map updates. The Verizon maps are updated on their servers. They already have changes to Rt 28. It seems to take Navteq years to make these updates and you have to pay a lot of $$ for them. It cost us $200 to update our Acura GPS last year and it still didn’t have 3 year old changes to some major highways.

Until the Garmin Nuvi 660 reaches my price range, I’ll stick with my RAZR.