Thread: Best way to use GPS offline?

there are a few options, i haven't quite figured out the best one for myself yet either, maps does have a feature in the lab setting that allows you to store a 10 miles radius of anywhere you choose in it's cache. of course that only works locally to where you choose. searching navigation in the market comes up with lots of options, of course most are expensive but i did find a navfree program that looks intriguing but i haven't been able to try it out yet. i believe there are ways to cache maps for google maps but i'm not sure how

I use copilot which is pretty good, I do use there "live" version because really most times I will have coverage, but it does still work without a live connection, just obviously you won't have live traffic & other live data. even for the times that you do have coverage, copilot has much better traffic integration than google maps. it is a subscription service for this traffic data but it's only a few bucks a year & I think this traffic data & the way it's integrated is well worth the few $$$, this is the same traffic data provider that mercedes benz uses on there newest OE systems I believe, def worth checking out. if you know you will be using it often without a connection then might be worth looking into one of there other versions besides "live", but even live makes a good backup for times with no connection.

Looks like Ill give copilot a shot. When you do have a signal do you prefer Google maps or Copilot?

The main thing I like Google maps over copilot is for voice recognition, makes entering a destination so much easier, aside from that in many ways copilot is nicer, like I said, for traffic or destinations that may have multiple routes that can depend on traffic then copilot is the hands down winner. Overall there both good, I usually prefer copilot unless I need to enter a destination quickly and easily, say if already driving, then Google maps is the winner because of voice recognition for destination which is usually spot on in its accuracy of recognizing & finding what I'm looking for easily

I just added up my usage for the last month or so of data on my feature phone (AT&T Pantech Link) and it came to just over 500MB and that includes tethering to my laptop a few times when the U-Verse router/gateway was flaky. Take out tethering and its usually not much more than a 50-60KB typical browsing the web with a Java browser and maybe watching 3-6min You Tube clip.

The reason I bring this up is that if you have a feature phone or even a smartphone but no tethering plan, its likely you could either tether to the Xoom via a Nokia phone that has WiFi or PDANet on a Android phone that allows PAN Bluetooth for short periods of time for Google Maps to update and I doubt you would go over whatever data limit you have.

For feature phones on AT&T at least its 200MB data limit. I went over that who knows how many times, but since they put their new data plan rules in effect as of Oct 1st billing cycle I got thumped with a SMS and a Snail Mail letter saying if was caught tethering again, they would automatically enroll me into $40 a month 4GB data plan.

So in closing you could still use Google Maps with a smartphone to supply data, I doubt very much you would hit any sort of data limit.

Yeah I was planning to tether the xoom to my phone via pda net. Can't wait for the nexus to finally come out. LTE + Tablet + Unlimited data in the car is going to be pretty sweet.