I’ll admit to driving around Sydney with a 2002 street atlas. It’s next to useless when it comes to plotting my route through any of the city’s myriad of new tunnels and toll roads, but I just never got around to buying a new one.

The first excuse for that was price. Cracking the spine on a shiny new atlas in 2003 would have cost me around $50, and I was prepared to deal with a rare wrong turn and memorise any new junction layouts if it meant I could spend that money on something more exciting. Like Playboy mudflaps (Ed – Stuart drives a Volkswagen Golf so fans, he’s now pretty easy to spot while driving around Sydney).

But somewhere in the last six years my excuses for not updating turned from thriftiness to laziness to downright apathy. The question is: is it the same story for users of in-car GPS systems. Are users of first generation Navman and TomTom devices also tootling around their towns with their original digital maps?

I expect that many are, put off by either the hassle of installing new map editions to their satnav or the high price of upgrading. At around $150 for new TomTom maps and $200 for Navman’s, the price of staying up to date is a heavy one. When inkjet printers run out of ink it’s sometimes cheaper to buy a new one on sale than to replace the cartridge. As GPS devices breach the $200 price point, it’s becoming the same story for GPS.

Which is why the sales model used by the Nokia caught my interest. With Nokia Maps 2.0 you can browse maps for free, gratis, nada. Up to date, street level cartography from all over the world is yours for the asking, so you can find your way at home or abroad. By downloading the maps to your handset, you also avoid data charges which have stung some users in the past.

If you have a GPS enabled handset, you can then enable turn-by-turn navigation for a fee, which is where the costs kick in.