Looking for a budget yet powerful GPS nav using your iPhone 3GS? MotionX-GPS Drive is a GPS navigation system app for your iPhone, with a few great features. You can use GPS Drive to find popular locations using an easy to use dial style directory that breaks down into coffee shops, gas stations, browse, restaurants, parking lots, movie theaters, hospitals, or you can enter any address, or pull up one from your iPhone contacts. The app has 2 options for directions, you can either use the non-voice controlled directions which is basically like the Google Maps app with larger icons, or you can opt in to the MotionX GPS Drive which requires you to pay a monthly service fee and get Live Voice Guidance. The app gives you a 30 day free trial of the Live Voice feature to try out with no strings attached whatsoever. After that you have to pay $3/month or $25/year for the voice feature.

The voice feature is great, uses a female voice with clean pronunciation and large directional icons and a map. MotionX uses the Bing mapping service. The Go To menu is a great shortcut page where you can tap go to My Home, Recently Found, Frequent Destinations, Favorites, Saved Locations, Contacts, Points of Interests, Lat/Long, and a bunch more shortcuts. The Maps tab shows you your current route with ETA, Distance Remaining, Time, Heading directions, and feet remaining until your next turn. The compass tab is a nice looking round compass that shows your speed mph, your altitude in feet, plus your latitude and longitude degrees for precise pinpoint location info. The iPod tab shows an easy to read large list of direction steps with big yellow turn icons. You can swipe left to see a different format where you just see a black page with the street name in green street sign format. A third screen is even simpler with your main location information. Tap the iPod text to slide open a menu where you can play any song in your iPod with simple pause, play next, previous, shuffle, repeat buttons.

MotionX GPS Drive works well when used with the Griffin Windshield Mount ($7.99) for your car which allows angle adjustment for easy viewing. You can also use the Griffin PowerJolt SE Car Charger ($13.55) for a complete and functional GPS system using your iPhone for under $25.

Options let you pick your driving options, picking from Fastest route, Shortest route, Avid Freeways, and even ability to use Live Traffic Data. A simulation mode lets you virtually drive through a route before your actual trip. This is a powerful feature we really love about the MotionX GPS Drive app. You get a slew of features and great functionality with this $2.99 GPS app. The only catch that you should be aware of is that it does require you to pay a monthly fee for the voice control feature, after 30 days. Recommended for anyone who prefers paying as they go instead of coughing up a big pile of cash like other GPS such as TomTom, MobileNavigator, and G-Map. With MotionX your maps are update live, with a small caching feature for faster load times. You can listen to your iPod as your use it for navigation for either driving or walking to any location, and you get a full featured directory search app and compass built in. This app works with iPhone 3G or iPhone 3GS.

Here is a video demo of the MotionX GPS Drive app on the iPhone

This 3rd Party App is available at the Apple iTunes AppStore. Browse the full list of all AppStore apps filed under the AppStore category.