I have a Samsung Galaxy S without a data connection. One of the few times it’s really noticeable is when I’d want to look something up on a map—if I’m not near a hotspot, I’m out of luck. Is there a map application that saves its files to the SD card? I’ve got 32 GB of space, and looking at an older install of MS Streets and Trips on my PC its data files take up just about a GB—including a good set of points of interest. I imagine a heap more POIs wouldn’t take up that much more room.
Garmin seems to have something for the iPhone and Windows phones, but not for a regular Android as far as I can tell. Google maps cache areas frequently visited—which is wholly useless for travelling between those points or for going somewhere new.
Anything out there?
Look into CoPilot (here). It looks like they’re coming out with a version soon that will have points of interest as well as downloadable maps. It’s $20 for maps of the USA and $25 for USA+Canada. They may have cheaper version without some of the features.
My TomTom App works when I don’t have a signal/Wifi. (Well, it did on my Hero, I switched back to the iPhone).
Mapdroyd is good, if the right maps are available for your area and the kind of use you want (i.e. streetmap vs terrain)
http://www.mapdroyd.com/
Thanks–should be something here that will work.
Note though, I just checked the TomTom page and it now looks like all they offer is an app for the iPhone.
There is a way to cache (store on your SD card) a specific area of the map in Google Maps. I haven’t tried it in a while, but I think you just long press on a given area and that will be one of the options.
I’ll mess with it in a little bit and report back.
Okay, yeah you have to enable the feature in Google Maps.
Go into Google Maps and press the Menu button. From there, select “Labs” and then put a check next to “Pre-cache map area.”
Then, when you’re in Google Maps, long press on an area of the map and click on the pop-up bubble that appears. Among the options in that menu you will see “Pre-cache map area.” Clicking that will save an area of 10 miles square (100 square miles) around the spot that you pressed.
Under Google Maps “Menu” there is a “Cache Settings” where you can see how much space is being used by cache, and delete previously cached areas.
ETA: This is also handy for saving frequently traveled areas permanently, which will make maps load faster and use less data.
Let’s see, if the continental US is about 3 million square miles, I’d better get busy!
Yeah, it’s not very practical if you need THAT much area saved ahead of time. Not too bad for a typical planned roadtrip, though.
Just added the greater NYC area. Ended up hitting the 10 cached areas limit. So much for my plans to add the whole US!
…but very handy in the short-term. Apps will come next.