Best smartphone for gps use?
 

Does anyone have any experience of different makes of smartphone in terms of suitability for use with gps? Speed of location (outside of phone signal areas), ease of use, ruggedness... At the moment I'm looking at Motorola's Defy+. To give you an idea of what I'm aiming at, I want a phone that will withstand minor knocks, water exposure etc, not too bulky, and useable with OSM and Viewranger. I've found it hard to find helpful comments on the web, and as a bit of a luddite I don't want to be blinded by techno babble - just tell me what OS works best etc.
PS Without wanting to stir up trouble, I'm anti iphone - disagree with Apple's operating and marketing principles. Tell me how marvellous they are, and why, in layman's terms by all means, but I still won't be getting one!
Thanks for your opinions,
Simon.
PPS This question is SPECIFICALLY about phones. I don't want to hear about dedicated gps from Garmin etc. Got a 276c. Love it. Doesn't run Viewranger. Thanks.

I like the nokia maps on their phones. I have been using them awhile now and have never has a problem with them, I have used them on my bike in a waterproof casing which fastens to the handlebars. I have also used it in various countries, Thailand and Iraq as well as using it as a sat nav in the UK. The mapping can be used online as you can with Google and apple maps but with the nokia maps you can down load the map on to the phone to use off line. Although I could not get Laos maps for it. The GPS quickness I have found to be good and picks up the signals well and whilst I was planning for my trip in Thailand and Laos (which is where I am now) I was putting in Long Lat grids, and after experimenting and dropping off the E and N from the Long Lat I found it worked on my Thai mapping
As the the phone its a standard Nokia Windows phone, they may not be as robust as most but if you get a decent case then it should be fine

Wayne

Pity you're anti iphone as after a Garmin and a TomTom that's what I've ended up using. A 5S in a cheapy ebay case on the bike and an iPad mini in a £5 ebay cradle in the Land Rover. Both run free OSM based mapping software called Nav Free. It's not quite as good as the Tom Tom software but it's good enough.

Whatever you think of Apple as a company at least in my experience their stuff just works and after the struggles I had with a Windows mobile (years old now) based sat nav I'm happy just to get to my destination. If I had a gun I'd honestly have shot the Windows system. :(

I did use since years iPhone and iPad as Navigation Unit. There are good Apps arround for Road Navigation like TomTom, Navigon or Sygic. Worked well through 20`000km through africa and many other trips.

And you can too use apps like motionX to download huge areas of the Bing/Google Satellite view. Very helpful for overlanders, to find good wildcamp spots and so on... And for offroad navigation.

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-BgvGXdvbSg...navigation.jpg


4x4tripping: Offroad Navigation with MotionX - the new "Custom Maps" functionality

I travel in a 4x4, so these devices arent in wind and rain. But there are cases around who will protect the Smartphones against dirt, water and are an good crash protection.

Then we come to the second point. What else the Smartphone can do for us overlanders and travellers:

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Vb_mFKaLCj...der-im-4x4.jpg

4x4tripping: The top 10 of the most useful apps for Overlanding

If you watch all solutions arround deeply, you will end with an new smartphone or tablet with android or apple iOS...

We travellers cant waste space and weight for devices who just can navigate, and nothing else. That counts for us 4x4 drivers and much more for bikers.

Surfy

I'm using a Galaxy S4 mini (android). Works as well as the TomTom unit it replaced, but isn't as slick as the Garmin I had before that. (The Garmins memory was too small to hold a whole country though).

I share your view I-stuff, too much renting hidden as buying. After that, the techie stuff gets mind blowing. Having worked out the smallest screen I could see at arms length (and hence on the bars) was 3.5-inch I set off looking at phones. Within the same ranges of phones (Galaxy S4's etc) there are variants that look bigger, cost more and then turn out to have smaller memories, slower processors and smaller batteries. The mobile providers seem to get these penguin variants made to sell as part of package deals, the consumer thinking the S4 mini + special dark black (or whatever) is an S4 on a good deal. I think you either spreadsheet a massive list of techie stuff or just pick a range you like the look of and work from there.

I am not disapointed with the S4 mini, the fact it replaced a burger box sized GPS, fag packet sized MP3 player and a Kindle is what I was aiming at.

You will BTW need a car charger unless someone has found a phone smart enough to control it's power use any better, USB charging won't keep up.

Andy

You'll be lucky if this thread stays on topic!!


USB needs to be more than 1 amp: I have a host of 1 amp adaptors before I realised that there is a 2.1 amp adaptor which does the job well.
+ a host of different lengths of USB cables (type A to USB mini/micro) to suit different circumstances.

Hi

I've used this phone on several occasions, extremely happy with it.
Android 2.something (old) but OSM software (Maps.me) can be installed no problem. Extremely rugged / manly :taz:

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-JfsOVcw1gw...ged+PDA%22.jpg

more info:
RugGear "World's Most Rugged Phone"

On the other hand... you can buy a rugged case for almost any phone.
I'm using a Doogee DG310 (looks and performs like a Samsung Galaxy S5 except for camera and resolution) and costs USD80 new from ebay. Great screen, get a rugged case and presto...

I would call that rugged!
It is interesting how the specifications have moved on in what is about 2 years, roughly, between your two phones.
Regarding the software, I have tried out the free version of Maps.me and now moved on to try other Android apps; there are masses of them which take OSM maps and put their own "face" to those same maps.

That Doogee looks like a very good value find - it is on UK ebay for about £60 or thereabouts.
It looks like the 2000mAh battery is replaceable - a decided advantage - and the screen is made by LG according to the ebay advertisements.
LG supply screen technology to a range of other manufacturers IIRC.

Many thanks folks. Good rapid response!
In no particular order:
I've a lot of respect for Nokia phones but don't hear many good things about the Windows system. Glad to hear earlier Android versions are ok (the Defy+ runs on 2.something too)
So the "mini" bit relates to internals rather than physical size? That clears up a bit of confusion thanks!
So is a Doogie a rebranded/packaged Samsung? (I'll do some research next click...)
I'll have a 12v power supply for the majority of the time. Moto do have a good rep for battery life though (Droid Razr Maxx, best in class, was another model I was looking at, but not as robust as the Defy+)
Apart from the politics of Apple corp., I work with a lot of mechanics with iphones and round where I live none of them have good signal/ reception and they've all got cracked screens!
Cheers for now,
Simon.

l used a basic Nokia phone for years.
Nokia isn't making phones at present, although they may come back into the market later.
Right now, after selling the right to use the Nokia brand for smart phones to Microsoft phones, "Nokia" are concentrating on the provision of mapping services.

Android have about 85% of the smart phone market.
Apple about 11%.
Which leaves around 4% for Microsoft and Blackberry to fight over.


I hope someone can give feedback about your current phone of interest, the Motorola Defy.
It did get a mention, quite a while ago, in another thread. You could do a search for those words.

Re cracked screens, we've had two on iPhones, both where people put them into their back pocket, forgot they were there, then got into a car and sat on them. You'll get charged about £40 to replace the screen but the bits are only about £10-12 to buy. My son did it as a job for a few months back in the spring, buying (iPads mainly) broken ones on ebay, fixing them and reselling. He could do a simple screen replacement in about 30 mins.

His own HTC Android phone fell out of his pocket running across the road and the screen broke when it hit the tarmac. He tried to get the parts for it but it was easier just to get a broken 4S iPhone and fix that - which is what he now uses.

Interesting about the relative market share for Android vs Apple. Often when I'm working at various sports events people will ask me to take photographs of them with their phones. I've probably done several hundred of them this year and on the basis of what they hand me I'd have guessed 50:50 Android vs Apple. Probably says more about the running / cycling / charity world than anything else though.

Well I feel sure that there is a battle going on for market share.

My figures are based on IDC: Smartphone OS Market Share 2014, 2013, 2012, and 2011
whereas there are other market surveys which show Apple to be fighting back with their 6th generation phone.
The far East market is where the really big battle is taking place: in comparison, the likes of the UK, and even the USA, are small beer.

When we were in China about five years ago we all had iPhones - or at least we bought Chinese copies of iPhones with whatever cheap electronics they could fit inside that made it capable of making a phone call and nothing more - a bit like a £5 Nokia in a fancy case. Load of the locals had them as well - or they may have been real ones - it's hard to tell at a glance, which is exactly the point.

Five years is a long time in China these days so things may have changed but it was a strange experience to wander through an (empty) glass and chrome western brands mall full of aspirational stuff from the US, Europe and Japan at the usual astronomical prices and then walk a couple of hundred metres to a (packed) windowless brick cube of a building full of small shops selling Chinese copies of exactly the same stuff. The Italian brand name leather wallet I bought is still surviving day to day use although I can't say the same for the Swiss watch. Still, it was only a few pounds. :rolleyes2:

Nokia maps on e72, battery holds 11 hours of navigation. Amazing. No one is even near to that. Good thing is that nokia here is available for samsung phones in beta version.

I am a bit wary of where "Nokia" (now branded as "HERE") is going with their business:
"Windows Phone's low market share, as well as the end of Nokia's partnership with Microsoft, has lead to the company prioritizing Android and iOS development" as quoted in Here (Nokia) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

So, it's very likely that we will find HERE maps on Samsung phones as a routine alongside other map options.

I think that smart phones all have very similar capabilities with regard to this aspect: I suspect this anyway, based on the universal use of smart phones for this purpose nowadays and the fact that no one seems to complain about them not carrying out this function (some folks think that they have a slow "response", lock on time or similar comments but that's about where it ends as far as feedback on this aspect is concerned).



I would be interested to hear why you have settled upon using viewranger among what must be 100s of apps on the market (for me, OSM is a given)

See post number 13 in the link, that I have just come upon:-
smart phones and gps

Excellent work sir! Many thanks. I sometimes wonder what I'm doing wrong with search engines 'cause everyone else seems to find stuff that I can't...
Viewranger is a particular app developed in conjunction with the TRF (Trail Riders Fellowship) and it's trail riding navigation that will be the primary use of the phone. (Apart from shared routes and map overlays, one of many other useful features is the "buddy beacon" so you can see which pub the rest of your mates have diverted to without telling you!)
Just bought an as new Defy+ for £50 and find they still use standard size SIM cards. Bonus! That means I can use my Nokia 6300 dinosaur that never runs out of charge (well, it seems like it!) for normal use, and swap to the Moto when out on the bike and can plug in the power. Screen is small by some standards, but the same size as my Garmin 276 so I'm used to that.
Thankyou for taking an interest in my predicament,
Simon.

Well, I spend far too much time looking at websites, during the winter, so I didn't get to that small nugget via a search engine; more by following-my-nose in fora.

I have found, over many years, that "taking an interest" tends to teach me along the way - so, there are benefits to me also!

Yes, I had seen a piece earlier about the UK TRF adopting Viewranger as a standard app for their purposes; yet another case of following discussions within fora.

Good to know that you are sorted.

For trials I use viewfinder it works on any phone android or iPhone works off line you decide what detail you what, I bought the local trails 1.50 then i got the lest detailed maps for distance traveling, works in the remotest areas, Albania back trails, where the maps are very basic, view ranger worked floorlessly,

Just an update: The Defy is a nice robust little phone and the battery seems to last about 5-6 hours with Viewranger's screen permanently on and active. There are bigger batteries available (with modified back panel included) which I may experiment with, although plugging in to the power socket on the bike is no problem. Kept in a water"proof" case, the touchscreen works only with an ungloved finger, unless the glove is wet!
Only negative I'm experiencing is that if I try to manipulate data or move through the menus too quickly, the app freezes and I have to exit and restart. This may be because of the older operating system of the Defy+, I don't know (don't ask which one, I get confused by all this jellybean fairycake bull###t nomenclature!!)
It's still worked out as a cheap way of having the entire uk os mapping on a gps.
Ride safe,
Simon.

For a nano second or two I have wondered about the naming of the Android versions; then I read somewhere that they are labelled in alphabetical order (in addition to the more usual numbering), so the later the first letter of the name of the operating system the newer the version.
e.g. Jellybean is a more recent release than Ice cream sandwich.

OTG
 

A minor victory made me think of this thread. Pardon my language and apologies to all of you who know this stuff, but a quarter century in engineering has made be well fed up with all the jargon (I know, it stops any Tom, Dick or Isambard stealing the nice easy jobs and I know mention of a non-self relieving cock makes the salesmen giggle and not get in the way, but it's annoying).


For Christmas I picked up things called OTG's (or OMG's as the wife has called them after the bad language the set up caused) as stocking fillers. These allow a device with a small USB designed to pull info to push through a big one. (So called host, although I didn't see anyone handing out the cheese and pineapple on sticks). This means we can use common memory sticks to carry our data about the place and access via phone or tablet, thus extending the use for a bit of kit that will fit in a match box.


Now, while we navigated to the moon with some sub ZX-81 device and a tape player we seem to have lost skills at making small computers work. My Samsung didn't like the small to big converter thingy or it's software app. Goodness know why but Samsungs like "Total Commander" not OTG.


It gets better. You need to install the app, start it, power down with the charger connected and then re-start. This seems to reset how the phone views the plug and lets it connect to the memory stick rather than try and feed off it.


I bet it would be quicker to just find an eight year old, but having battled this thing on and off for months and now won to the point of viewing map data held on a nice safe stick and sending my tracks there for later, I thought I'd post the fact!


Andy

On the go indeed
 

Interesting to me, in that I had never heard of this capability.
You prompted me to look around and there is an app which "decides" if a particular smart phone is up to the job:-
How to tell if your Android phone or tablet supports USB On-The-Go - CNET

I am in no rush to muck about with my own phone (I have only just figured out what the terms "jail breaking" and "rooting" mean) but what app is saving your tracks to this OTG attachment?

Chinese phones to match Chinese motorbikes
 

Since this is a key factor in the design of phones for use on motorbikes (on mine anyway because I have been known to drop both the phone and the bike), I've just posted some info into the sticky thread (so that I can find it again!).

http://www.horizonsunlimited.com/hub...in-et-63191-24

Real-time GPS tracker does the tracking. This goes to a website but you can also access via Total Commander (or Fx) and drag the track files onto the stick.


Andy

I've just started to become familar with the AGM Stone, having purchased this rugged (love that adjective) thingy recently.
My earlier posts in the sticky thread give the specifications for the Stone e.g. it has a massive battery capacity (4000 mAH from memory).
http://www.horizonsunlimited.com/hub...-26#post512904


My first impressions are good.
I've also started to take an interest in viewranger; I am warily checking out what their website is "all about".

I'm still using Viewranger on my phone, purely as a gps with UK os maps on, but I'm put off by all the extras which appear to be trying to create some sort of wierd lifestyle constant "monitor me and see how wonderful and adventure packed my life is" cr#p. Call me an old curmudgeon!
I've been pointed towards Mytrails (?), which my mate suggests is simpler and geared less towards the lookatme facebook generation. I have yet to check it out as what I've got works.
With the appearance of more/better model-specific hard cases, maybe ruggedness has become less of an issue?
Sort of off topic, but still part of the conversation I hope.
Ride safe,
Simon.

It is not just using a USB stick that way. In fact I don't think that USB connectors are particularly rugged .. so I'd not use them while moving.

You can also access your USB camera... anything you would access via USB from your computer. So the phone becomes computer like for USB things. So if your running out of room on your phone .. you can then take stuff off the phone and put it on any USB memory - CD, hard drive, stick... probably not as fast as a computer. But lots smaller and probably less battery energy.

... could even have a USB hub? So you can have the camera and hard drive connected and transfer the photos from one to the other under the control of the phone. Usefull where the camera won't do it by itself.

Thanks for that summary; I don't see the OTG capability as too important to me at present, which is just as well because a wee app I have used on my Stone phone (rhyming slang maybe?) tells me that I don't have OTG capability.
Rooting the phone might help in that regard.

I can see how it is good for flexibility in offline storage and I think I would use such a capability in that manner only, rather than on the move.
I have yet to hook up the phone to a computer to take any files off the phone; I gather that is straight forward. A host-peripherai (aka master- slave) facility with the phone as the slave.

I still use a stand alone camera which is another reason that I don't feel a need for OTG; that all gets downloaded to a notebook and then onto backup external hard drives x 2 (having lost too many happy snaps over the years to failed internal hard drives).

Thanks!
Yes, I'm wary of viewranger which does indeed want to suck me into their online community.
My short experience with them is that downloading maps is overly limited to 10285 tiles per day - sounds a reasonable limit but when zoomed in that daily allowance can be consumed quickly.
Also, I think Viewranger is taking it's maps from Mapquest so ........... might as well just use Mapquest directly??
I shall probably delete it soon, especially since you have introduced me to a new "love of my life", mytrails - I've started experimenting with it and it does appear to be very straight forward, although there is some function buried in there related to registering, I think.

Currently, I use Mapfactor Navigator (MN) as a general "point and shoot" sat nav capability and it works just fine for that; downloading OSM is done simply - name a country and you can have it basically with no mention of tiles.
On the downside, I have never spotted a means of retaining tracks with MN. It may be there, but I haven't come across it.