I use google maps mobile on my phone (Rogers branded Treo 750 running WM6) to view maps. All is working nicely, except that it eats through my data plan pretty fast. I've only got 5mb / month to share between my email, web browsing, and viewing maps.
I used to use a tool called MGMaps, which had the ability to let me save the map tiles locally on an SD card before hand, so that it could look it up from there instead of going on the internet. Internet was used only for routing / searching for locations.
Does google maps mobile have something similar to that? I know that map tiles are cached - so maybe a way to pre-populate the google maps mobile cache?
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Ye looks like that will have to do. The height thing is an annoyance. I've read up so far that GMM limits the cache to 2mb and that it must reside in the system's main memory.
I'll do what you suggested, and try to manually cache as much as possible. Thanks for the tips!
... maybe in the end I'll just buy tomtom navigator or something, though :P
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by: simonetPosted on 2008-05-31 at 09:26:02ID: 21684184
As you already know, GMM will use the local cached version of the maps if there is one and no internet access is available. If internet is available, it will check if the local map is older than the online version.
However, there is still a big flaw in GMM: it doesn't handle the height factor correctly. It will only cache the latest used "zoom level"/height of each location. This is fine if you only use one zoom level (such as 11), but if area constantly changing zoom levels, GMM will require internet access.
One suggestion is: stick to one zoom level and navigate through the places you need most using your WM connected to your PC or a Wifi connection. This will force GMM to cache the viewed maps so that when you're on the go, the maps will be there. Remember: stick to one zoom level.
I know that is a bit of an herculean task, but GMM still needs a lot of work to be really functional for everybody. This is the exact reason I don't like it. I'd rather use Destinator, which is commercial, but the $$$ I save on mobile data access compensates for its price.
When I need directions on a map not available on Destinator, I use Nav4All. It is free, and requires minimal internet access. It has a feature that uses data access only to get the locations of the destination address and route. This means that it uses minimal data transfers. No maps, no nothing, and it does a pretty good job. It can also display maps, if you want. It can trace an entire 50km route and still downloading less than 15kb of data. I wanna see GMM do that!