By that standard, my car can be marketed with "free driving, forever! At only 75% cost!". The fact that those b*tards at the gas station charge for gas isn't my problem. And the fact that all sales are subject to tax also isn't my problem.

It's not that it doesn't have navigation, or that it is or not charged. The point was that mandatory parts of what is considered navigation, like maps and searching are all subject to data transfers, a fact that was conveniently left out.

No matter what you consider routing, navigation, whatnot, the device:

* lacks the ability to natively preload an area for later routing
* lacks searching capability
* because of the above, any unplanned, free routes are not realizable.

As a result, the device is not independent, not free and does not route unless under specific circumstances which can safely be considered outside normal operation.

When I need my navigation is when I'm lost. When I don't know where I am and where I should go. At that exact point, I need to shell out if I want any help at all.

Without the link, I get nothing out of the damn Maps app, not even coordinates. I can thank third party apps and Camera for those.

Let's assume you hired a guide to get you through the mountains, and, half way through you get lost and ask the guide for help. The guide replies "I have no idea where I am, where to go and what's around. I cant find anything". Would you consider that a guide service? Would you pay?

If Nokia would have allowed me to preload the maps for an arbitrary area, say, Bucharest, I'd be half-happy. And if it would allow me to search, OFFLINE, that map area, it would qualify as navigation. Forget voice. I wouldn't be happy, because I consider saved bookmarks a basic feature, but what the heck, it would drive me back home.

But it has no such features. I'm lost, I pop out the navigation, and it puts a red blot in the center of a gray area and says "you are here" which is the kind of help I'd expect from a crayon.

If it can't even provide an arrow towards where I want to be or where I was without payment, it's not free. And if I don't pay, it's not navigation. The package never said "Navigation only works if you are online". If it did, we'd all be golden.

Also, it seems the phone does calculate a route if offline. I noticed it transferred data when calculating, so I assumed it did it with online help. So at least there's that. If you have the map of where you are, where you want to be and the area in between, and you have a good enough memory to pinpoint start and destination, you have navigation.

With no preload, that's actually less useful than it seems.

If you have a long-range car that "was designed to always be on the road", does it seem OK to you for the car to explode if ever pulled over?

Designed to be online 24/7 means it CAN maintain a link 24/7, not that it has to. And you know that full well.

--

Frankly, this is becoming tiresome. Just because a few of you don't route with the phone doesn't mean that people who do can be pointed at.

I'd like to see how this thread would look if N900 required confirmation from Nokia.com to allow you to read your contacts, or accept an incoming call. Hey, it's free, right?

Before calling people crybabies, think it through. If a feature you need at a moment's notice required Nokia.com to work at random times, would you still be here, venting (against)?

An advertised function is missing a good chunk of its features. These functions have been offloaded online, at a substantial cost to the user, especially when roaming, for bad data plans, and emergencies. This limitation was never advertised.

I'm not even going to open the point of Nokia servers being offline or the service being discontinued.