Satellite navigation systems (GPS) have become increasingly sophisticated, reliable, simple to use and surprisingly cheap over the past couple of years.
The downside to all that is that they've also become increasingly indispensable for the sizeable segment of the population who are geographically challenged.
And let's face it,if you can't find your way from Point A to Point B, you're also probably going to be the type of person who forgets to take your portable SatNav device with you when you leave the house.
So the arrival of Compass, Vodafone's location-finding and route-planning service, is a welcome development.
The obvious limitation of Compass is that you need to own one of two top-of-the-line BlackBerry handsets, the Curve 8310 or the Pearl 8110, to use it.
Vodafone says the service will become available on more devices over coming months, and the good news is that the enabling GPS functionality is finding its way into cheaper and cheaper phones as the cost of the technology comes down.
I found the Compass service worked well with a level of sophistication that comes close to that available on the dedicated SatNav devices.
Type your destination address into the BlackBerry and you'll be guided to your destination - both visually on the handset's screen and audibly by a rather robotic voice coming out of the phone's speaker.
The service also allows you to choose a destination from a list of seven types of amenities: restaurants, cinemas, pizza shops, petrol stations, accommodation venues, pubs and nightclubs, plus parking facilities.
You can specify a distance limit to make the selection more useful: from only those amenities within 2km of your current location, up to a 500km radius if you're prepared for a long drive to collect that pizza.
One advantage of a phone-based navigation tool such as Compass is that its maps are automatically updated, whereas updating the mapping data on some dedicated SatNav devices can be a laborious process involving connecting the device to a PC.
Vodafone has made the Compass service free until October 31. From November it will cost $2.50 a day to access or $10 for a full month's subscription. For those of us who don't get lost every day, the casual rate seems like good value.
After all, with petrol prices the way they are, it doesn't take much to burn through a couple of dollars of wasted gas by making a wrong turn in an unfamiliar part of town.
