ViaMichelin has today announced a partnership agreement with Motorola, Rough Guides and Creativity Software Ltd to provide mapping content for Motorola's mobile phones.

The new application, developed by Creativity Software Ltd, will be preloaded onto all new handsets from today.

Providing location maps for over 200 cities across 33 European countries, the application will provide users with street level detail of maps directly on their phones and will have over 15,000 points of information built in (presumably that's where Rough Guides comes in the equation).

So this isn’t a GPS-based service, it literally just means that you will have all the aforementioned map data in your Motorola mobile, which, to consumers used to using a GPS device might seem a bit thin, as (shock, horror) you'll have to manually work out where you are before you can reference the maps.

We think as it's free (and already preloaded) from now on in Motorola handsets that it's a nifty little addition to their feature set and could come in handy. During pub quizzes, for example: "I told you the Brandenburg gate was in West Berlin…". Or not.