You need smartphones to do GPS navigation in the modern sense, which is: 1) look for e.g. "Italian restaurant" in your area 2) look at choices nearby, screen ou

You need smartphones to do GPS navigation in the modern sense, which is: 1) look for e.g. "Italian restaurant" in your area 2) look at choices nearby, screen out ones currently closed, too expensive, bad reviews, etc., and pick one 3) navigate there In the early days of GPS, you needed an actual address to navigate to. That's not very useful if you don't know where you want to go in the first place. Smartphones changed all that: now you don't need to know a specific place you want to go, you just need to know what you want to do generally, and the nav app will help you find where exactly you want to go and take you there. That's impossible without either an internet connection or a very large local database (that's out of date).