Good post but I disagree with your statement that a phone can't achieve the same results in urban areas as a dedicated GPS and it makes me think you haven't been following this thread at all or read over it.

Online and offline I use my phone for this constantly without failure.

In the Backcountry it's brilliant with the cartography as you described. Now with dedicated GPS having similar hardware as currently used in smartphones the only value would the maps that you suggested. But this was never great on dedicated units to begin with. With the introduction of GPS in mass market devices like the smartphone development in alternatives has skyrocketed to the point that is no longer the case.

There seem to be 2 different camps that argue against the smartphone as a replacement of a dedicated GPS. One saying it's no good in the backcountry with cartography, the other saying it is but it sucks with road navigation and turn turn. So the Garmin crowd can't seem to agree on its use and strong points.
Both arguments have been extensively covered and countered.
Hardware concerns have also been addressed.
It seems, by the recurring criticisms, that the valid responses to those criticisms are being ignored. Rather than keeping going with the same old invalid or discounted arguments, it may be more constructive to ask how a certain requirement could be achieved without a dedicated GPS. There are plenty of threads discussing what can be done with one. This one is or has become about doing it with something that you already have and use daily.

I find the criticism of the OP becoming increasingly offensive myself as it's moving towards calls for the OP to back off from his own thread which he had been keeping updated and factual, of which there have been positive responses. What's that all about. If ur would be misleading BS would be one thing. But this isn't. If you don't like it don't look at it.

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Tacos Tyring Travels.com

PanEuropean ,, glad to have some one knowledgable on the subject join us,,

My hominem responses are backed by an intellectual analysys of several garmins, in many regions of the world, And yes everything in Korea costs 3 - 400% more than say USA or EEC ,, I have lost huge amount of good money ,, being abused by the garmin ,, I wrote about that in earlier posts.
CEO being a Taiwanese ,, all repairs are shipped to Taiwan,,, ( In Asia) we pay for the DHL charge of USD 90 per incident ,, then we have to pay USD 399 to add a Korean keyboard to the garmin software, On top of all this,, units has failed me and others miserably. Not to add the cost of the maps they sell.

This board is to get away from the monopoly of garmin and gain the freedom by using smartphones.

I also am a dedicated street rider ,, using my Harley Davidson Road King ,, had Sygic ,, in Europe ,, Asia ,, Australiasia ,, Russia ,, USA and South America. Both rural and urban settings ,, my smartphone connected with satts faster than the garmin,, even shows me how many satts and where ,,, Sygic comes with thousands of POI from camp sites to cigarette vendors. For adventure riders to Gobi and Uganda ,, you have other choice APPs ,, that details immense amount of info. Yes most cases for FREE. (Motels in Russia really helped,, thousands of them)

Yes I attack garmin ,, because I have been ripped off by them. Yes I am argumentive because ,, I truly believe we ,, motorcycle riders can benefit from using smartphones.
It seems ,, you have not been reading our arguments , rather paying more attention to my personality.

Explore the avaliable apps ,, see our logic behind our debate ,, look at the harware choices, from SATT phone attachement to good cameras.

If you look at the screen shot of this thread ,, Navigation + Maps,, already words mentioning Android ,, smartphone,, Ericsson,, Maps With Me ,, are taking up at least 30% of the sound bite.

Forget my hominemness ,,
Rather wonder if this thread is being sponsored by the Messrs; garmin

I think that there are more differences between the phone/tablet & open source map solution and the GPS navigator & proprietary cartography solution than you have described.

I'm going to limit my comparison (below) to off-line use of phones or tablets (meaning, not having a continuous data connection via telephony), because that would be prohibitively expensive for international touring, and the need for a data connection would render the phone/tablet useless in areas not served by a 3G or 4G phone network.

The proprietary cartographic database used by dedicated GPS navigators is, on average, about 600 MB in size for either North America or Europe. That implies considerable road attribute detail and numerous waypoints (fuel, hotel, etc.).

I don't believe that the open source cartography contains the same road attribute detail as the proprietary cartography, in particular, details such as turn restrictions, time of day restrictions, and lane definition. If it did, we would be seeing the manufacturers of GPS navigators using open source cartography, rather than paying vendors such as Navteq or Nokia for their proprietary cartography. There's no easy way that I am aware of to compare the qualities of different cartographic databases, but comparing size of the database (for the same area) will provide a 'rough order of magnitude' comparison of the level of detail provided in each database.

There is no doubt that the speed of the hardware (processors) provided in phones and tablets has increased dramatically in recent years, and it is this increase in processor speed that has enabled map display and some navigational guidance to be provided (offline) using phones and tablets. But, at the same time, the manufacturers of the dedicated GPS navigators have also taken advantage of increased processor speed and capabilities to enhance the guidance their products provide. Examples of this include lane guidance, photo-realistic display of overhead signs, and spoken street names.

I think that a good analogy would be comparing cameras embedded in today's crop of phones and tablets to conventional cameras manufactured by companies such as Nikon, Canon, or Hasselblad. Phone cameras today take a remarkably good picture, and have come a long way from the fuzzy, marginally acceptable pictures of 10 years ago. But, if you want to take the best possible picture under the most demanding and varied conditions (this being the analogy to urban navigation), a 'dedicated' camera will give you better performance than a phone camera.

The other side of the coin is that if you just need a photo to identify something, or to show to a friend, or to email to someone, then there's really no point in going out and spending all the money to buy a dedicated camera.

Like I said in my first post, it's a question of "horses for courses". The task one wants to achieve should drive the decision of what navigation system to use. It's a fool's game to try and say one solution is better than another without first doing task analysis.

Michael

This is one of a dozen reasons why this thread started, way back when there were a series of other such threads about smart phones in this forum which never really addressed the multitude of facets related to the subject.

The title of this thread, in total not paraphrased and as I understood it in "conversation" with seouljoe at that time, was to bring out the rapidly developing smart phone issues - hence, and just as one instance, I posted a couple of days ago about how dedicated trail riders in the UK are looking at using GPS to track/plan their riding.
i.e. "offroad" not on the established highways.

There has been some useful input in the past couple of days which relate to navigation across featureless terrain, whether it be at sea, in the air or across desert: useful because that input provides background information to the utility of GPS based navigation and how it is being used to provide increased levels of information to those driving tin-cans on 4 wheels.
Such developments are also being made for (as just one instance) heavy truck drivers so that they have no excuses for becoming stuck under low bridges or jammed between the houses of historic streets in the UK or between the dry stone walls of the byways.

But I believe the thread is supposed to be about using smart phones; peoples' experiences with the hardware (changing rapidly), the software (also changing rapidly) and the fixing of the kit to motorcycles (and perhaps other types of vehicles) in preference to the very heavy bias there has been within this forum to dedicated Satnav unts and garmin in particular (as someone else mentioned, at times the HUBB can appear to be a product placement forum for Garmin in particular).

I certainly see no reason whatsoever to get on the back of the OP and suggest that the thread be locked or that he should disown it by not making his views known.

I still use a really old second hand Garmin nuvi 205W and a tablet to navigate, but most of the time a few sticky notes on the screen suffice.

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Dave

An incidental report of yesterday:
The Android OS now has 85% of the smart phone market.
Apple takes another 11% which leaves the balance 4% for Blackberry et al to fight over.
(I didn't pick up if this report relates to the UK market or worldwide).

Who knows where this tech will be in, say, another 2 1/2 years (which is the time that has elapsed since seouljoe started this thread - so it really is all your fault Joe but no "the messenger should not be shot").

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Dave

Wow ,, Walkabout,, here I am 19:17 hours in Seoul, Korea ,, listening to your prime minister and the bad boy Milliband, in the parliament,, live ,, debating,,why we need to bomb the xhit out of ISIS bastards,,
One should read a book called War of Religion ,, written pre 9/11 ,, he predicted very exact thing ,, but then the war of religion has been going on since the 16th century.
No , never shoot the messenger.

+1. I've been looking at suggested apps over the years without replying. It might seem to an onlooker like Joe's crusade because of that. But not so. Very appreciated thread.

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Tacos Tyring Travels.com

I've just fallen upon this smartphone app that seems to do just about everything in the urban environment (for those who like to have their hand held ever so tightly while navigating).
CoPilot - Your Best way to Navigate
It's not one I can remember hearing of previously (perhaps because their webpage has a definite slant towards the north american continent) and I certainly haven't investigated it at all - maybe some one has tried it??

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Dave

I came on this while looking for information about alternative sources of digital mapping.
Route Planning on the iPhone | Adventure GPX

Although it is specifically about iPhones it also relates to the wider topic of said maps and also the software available nowdays for route planning (something which has scarcely been mentioned herein previously).

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Dave

Reading in other places I glean that this particular app is very orientated to the market in north america; so much so that to purchase maps for other parts of the world is a relatively expensive transaction compared with the competitors.
On that basis I would expect it to remain "pinned" to the americas, certainly for anyone who does some basic research.

Meanwhile I have remembered this thread of a while ago:-
http://www.horizonsunlimited.com/hub...software-72464
(I took nearly a year off from this type of interest to get on with my other life and I kind of thought this information was part of this thread).

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Dave