Good GPS/satnav on iPhone ?

[LeSedna]

Hi,

I'm tired of having to struggle to manage wifi and Plans to go out or find my way in other countries which I did non stop for 2 months.

I want to have a good GPS app on my phone, offline, and don't wanna fiddle around because I'm gonna buy the full Europe map which is usually 80e so I don't wanna buy a disappointing app !

At the monent it seems there is Tomtom, Navigon, iGo, and CoPilot.

Any suggestion ?

 

[arv_foh]

I like Navigon

 

[MarcusGHedwig]

Yeah, Navigon was fucking awesome on my old iPhone, couldn't have asked for better! I loved how it dropped the volume of music (but didn't mute it) when giving directions, and that you could Google search destinations. Of course, now I have Google Maps/Navigation on Android

 

[LeSedna]

That's the major shame of iOs : there is no GPS app included. Plan / GoogleMaps (in iOS 6 it's gonna change for a proprietary Apple solution who wants to get rid of google) is very good for what it is and very precise but the absence of any offline solution is annoying because you can only use it when you have your 3G coverage. So for people who travel a lot in different europe countries, its use is limited.

 

[MarcusGHedwig]

Navigon stores all map info on the iPhone's internal memory

 

[006]

Yup, Navigon is what you are looking for.

 

[Lasse Lammert]

I'm using skobbler and waze

 

[LeSedna]

@Marcus : yeah I know I was just ranting about that lack in iOs eventhough it could be easily made considering the existence of googlemaps which is a pretty good cartography !

I see Navigon calls for 30e/year for updated maps. Ugh ! Not that it's mandatory but oh well.

I was almost set for iGo at some point but the lack of speed limit and speed info is a turn off, because when you drive a lot (I'm talking thousands of km every month) it's easy to forget a local slower speed limit and get flashed especially in france with all our sneaky and evil speed radars (it happened to me twice already this year).

I wanted to try Skobbler but it says "will be available soon in your country". I think it implies "france" because my laptop and iphone are "french". I'm not even in france and don't want an app in french. Anyway I downloaded the offline map from their "forevermap" app just to have some map available offline and which seems to work like Plans, and am very disappointed by the OpenMaps cartography : in the region of portugal where I am, the map is simply 30% filled up. It only has the biggest routes. The center of porto seems okay though, and the map is 16mo so I'm gonna keep it but I'm not gonna rely on that if the navigation app map is the same ! The place where I live has almost no street and I'm talking the surroundings of a 2M inh city !

I realize I had "OffMaps" in the same vein that is a simple offline map as well, it's way more detailed (70mo just for the city of Porto and its area) and maps are free as well.

I'm gonna try waze but since it's community based, it's the kind of things that usually work better in USA because these apps are used on a larger scale and in english. Could defeat the purpose of me wanting an up to date map because it's a pain to follow my old car gps when it doesn't know the "recent" highways, or the very tiny one-way roads that it wants you to take in the wrong direction in remote areas and won't propose you another choice !

Thanks anyway for the reminder Lasse, I'm gonna try that before I hit Navigon

 

[Deus.exe]

I've got CoPilot on my Android phone. Very happy with it.

 

[LeSedna]

Any NavFree love ? It's super cheap, buy per country for a few bucks. It uses openstreetmaps, I'm looking into it again because I can't say to myself such a map doesn't include my own street, there must be a bug in the skobbler forevermap app !

EDIT 2 : whoops, comments are a disaster for it (on iphone at least). Says it asks for a connection to search a destination, sometimes even when the wifi is activated and working properly.

I think I'm gonna try Navigon because it's the only one which does everything I need

 

[LydonB]

Waze is pretty cool.

 

[LeSedna]

^ but not offline ! When you travel in europe, it's useless

I bought Navigon, finally. It's actually pretty cool how the 3D works and how I found supermarkets around me thanks to its integrated search, all offline. I'm set with this one. Thanks guys