Offline Windows Mobile street level mapping with GPS

[RichChestmat]

Hi there,

I have a square screen Treo 750v with Windows Mobile with a 1Gb miniSD and am planning to buy a cheap bluetooth GPS receiver. I will be able to use this with Google Maps for when I get lost in the UK. My data plan makes the occasional connection affordable and I like the Google Maps interface. The symbology is ideal and the option to bring up a photo layer can be handy. However this is going to be unusable if I go on holiday since roaming data charges will be unmanagable and GMM doesn't allow you to pre-cache data.

So I am looking for an alternative. I don't drive and so Tom Tom is quite expensive and overkill for walking. Route finding would be nice but not essential. Vito Navigator looks good but the style of the maps that can be downloaded are not really at 1:25,000 street level and I am not keen on scanning and georeferencing maps to add in myself. That seems like more effort than simply opening a paper map. I don't mind the preparation of copying prepared maps to my PDA before any trip though. Mapopolis looked ideal and affordable but is no longer trading. I would be prepared to spend $24 or so for simple GPS aware mapping of the US or european countries as required. Whichever solution should also enable me to find a location based on address or postcode - the usual.

I'm a city person so A-Z or GMM style maps would be preferred over OS symbology. Although I'd want to be able to add maps for cities in Japan, Europe and the US I'd also like to have the option of UK instead of using GMM. I also want to get mapping for Hawaii too.

On the side (maybe worth a seperate investigation) I would be interested in some geocaching activities. I have had some GIS exposure at Uni working with ArcGIS and could tinker. It might also be nice to export my recorded path and export to ArcMap or Google Earth. But this is a seperate requirement from where am I, where is that? and how do I get there?

Can anyone make a recommendation? I've tried to be specific but at the same time I'm sure there are other non-road users that have a similar requirement.

[robertn]

Memory map and Ozi Explorer are good ones, although there are many more worth lookign at. Vito cames to mind as well. Anything that can do topo can do street mapping (without routing and guidence) - it's all down to sourcing suitable digital maps

Both the above can be used with scanned and geocoded maps. Its a bit of a fiddly process to do yourself, but can be done.

What I would do is look at the availbe maps first, then decided on the software application based on them supplying suitable maps at a price you are happy with. Scanning and encoding your own maps is not something I ever felt was a particualrly productive use of my spare time, but if you want to save money can be done.

The other souce of maps can be the internet. Take a screen shot of the map you want, edit it and save it away as a bit map and geocode it. To do this you will need to know the lat/long of at least 2 points on the map, the bigger the map the more error you will get so more than a few miles square per map starts to get too much error. (It's a bit of a grey area copyright wise though.)

[RichChestmat]

Thanks for taking the time to answer but as I said I am looking for a solution with prepared georeferenced maps available and MemoryMap uses OS symbology.

I've had a dig round the rest of this place and found mention of Nokia Smart2Go. That was a struggle to get working on my phone but once I had downloaded some maps onto my card it seems to do a reasonable job for the money. GMM is still slicker and easier to read but Smart2Go does offer the chance of working offline with some minimal preparation. It's just a shame that it's so buggy and slow.

EDIT: Having said that if you could kindly point me in the direction of a not totally illegal but cost effective for personal use way of sourcing digital maps suitable for your solution then I would be happy to take a closer look. I'd be looking for something that covers cities at 1:25,000 raster or vector with decent symbology. Remember if the cost is that many more times expensive than a paper map then it's not worth it.
And come to think of it how would scanned maps offer a gazeteer function? How could I do a search for streets and post codes?

[philpugh]

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