ForeverMap 2.1 It’s holiday time! But we’ve all heard horror stories about people coming back from holiday and getting hit with a huge bill for using their smartphone outside the UK. Skobbler ForeverMap Skobbler ForeverMap Settings on the iPhone So, when I went off to Portugal recently I was determined not to make any unnecessary calls …
Only a few years ago we'd be paying hundreds of pounds for this sort of functionality (hey, Audi try and charge me about 200 quid for an updated satnav map DVD still!).
I find it amazing that we can now get all this for substantially less than the price of a swift half (beer icon, obviously).
It's not the first off-line map browser for iOS. I have tried both oMaps and OffMaps, and they both work OK-ish. Neither is as smooth as the built-in Maps app, but with the current competition something good is bound to pop up eventually.
The biggest problem is in the datasets used. The OpenStreetMap data quality is very varied. In some places it's better than GoogleMaps (e.g. Holland, a lot of the UK), but in some parts it's laughable (parts of Sweden, parts of Switzerland).
(The T&C for the Google map API explicitly forbid using the data off-line, so all these off-line map browsers use the OpenStreetMap dataset.)
The review of "app of the week" is not about first-in-class, but about being the best.
And given how much time you spend navigating around on it (and how much extra time/frustration when it goes wrong), any price between zero and five quid should be seen as equal, so not an argument for better/worse.
Plan ahead.
When I visited the UK (from Canada), I brought along my Iphone to use as a GPS in the rental car (using a nice app from 'MotionX'). I downloaded the necessary map "tiles" *in advance* before I left home (about 150MB), covering a range of zoom and covering well beyond my planned route just in case. It was easy! When I got to the lovely UK, I had already turned-off data roaming. I used the Iphone as my in-car GPS with great success (needs DC power cord, GPS eats battery!). The bill for roaming data when I arrived home was $0.00.
PS: Driving in the UK is wonderful. Comedy cars and exotics are extremely common; a visual feast for car lovers. Most drivers are skilled and courteous. Roads are typically as smooth as glass. The landscape is to die for. I hope that you Brits appreciate it!
"Most drivers are skilled and courteous. Roads are typically as smooth as glass"
Given those statements I doubt your map skills are up to the job. Are you sure you were actually in the UK? Or do you hail from a place which only has mud tracks?
As for the iPhone as GPS; I second its usefulness - I use TomTom on it, the only issues there are the things that TomTom sucks at:
- by default demanding you press buttons when you should have your eyes on the road (not exactly helped by the IOS "Apple cannot make any money off you" screeching in the form of "network lost" messages which are totally unnecessary and frankly flaming irritating)
- its habit to let you circle around the final target location when you're near, usually accompanied by a lot "turn around" instructions. As the latter has been a *cough* feature of TomTom since v1 I don't expect this to change by using its official cradle (no, no, don't expect TomTom to ever support a normal Bluetooth GPS aerial - this is about money, not about helping you navigate).
I think I'm going to check out this app, could indeed be useful.
Shame that Ovi maps are not available on android (don't care about iphone as I don't have one), it is far superior to everything I have seen, but means I have to carry my old X6 and I might as well just carry a Tom Tom. Hopefully Ovi will come to win phone, and Nokia release it in time for my next upgrade..
Ovi is free too!
Sounds great if you, like me, do lots of travelling with work (or socially), I'm typically in a city/country for a couple of days, before moving on to the next. Purchasing a lonely planet app for each place could get pretty costly, not as much as roaming charges granted, but costly nonetheless.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
