Mapopolis Rocks!
The real "whoo-hoo" factor for getting my SP5m and GPSlim236 set in when I discovered Mapopolis.
Having a bluetooth GPS and a QVGA smartphone with a 1GB CF card just screamed out for a navigation solution. And the cool part is that this entire solution cost about $800 (including shipping and the $99 mapping solution from Mapopolis) – which is on par with the navigation devices like the Tom Tom cost, only my solution doesn't just do navigation, it is a phone, an email and texting device, a 1.3mp digital camera, an MP3 player, and a laptop modem, too.
I spent forever Googling for a solution that would give me instant gratification (i.e., downloadable). Mapopolis gave me just that – they had a beta smartphone client (that went final on just the other day on the 20th) and downloadable maps.
The client is free, and they sell the maps. The entire US/Canada map set, including navigation support, was only $99. A great deal!
The software is great – lots of rich, cool features. First and foremost, navigation works well. Mapopolis recalculates its routes faster on my phone than my in-car GPS does – it’s amazing. There is a nice large readout showing the next maneuver, along with a real time map of where you are. The text-to-speech component is well thought through – you can set it to start giving you warnings based on the number of seconds until you have to make a maneuver, instead of a distance. The default is to start warning you 60 seconds in advance, and to remind you every 20 seconds, which is great. And as a nice touch, Mapopolis has US & UK male & female voices to choose from.
While you are navigating, there are several panels you can have up if you want to see other information besides the next maneuver, and then the next maneuver panel automatically pops up when you get close to the maneuver. The cooler panels are an ETA pane (that can be up all the time if you want) and a Pilot Data pane, which shows you a compass, your speed, and the distance to the next maneuver.
Mapopolis makes it super easy to find locations – address inputting is tied into mapping information, so by the time you enter the street number and the first few characters of the street name, you have found the location. There is a nice set of POIs that had most of the things I was looking for this weekend. And they nicely integrate everything you do into favorites automatically. The only bummer here is that integration with phone contacts doesn’t work, it just pops up “could not open contact database”.
I have a few wishes around favorites – I wish I could edit my favorite place names. I wish that I had more options to move favorites around other than “move to top”. Also 20 favorites is completely arbitrary, it should be a user setting. Finally, I wish that I could search the favorites, but that is only because I wish I could have a lot more than 20 :-). I probably wouldn’t care as much if the contact database integration worked.
There is a landmark feature that I have been struggling to use. It is a great theory, allowing me to add my own landmarks, but you can’t search them independently from the built in POIs, and you can’t edit them without scrolling around to them on the map and selecting them. Plus when they get into your favorites, they randomly stop working as a favorite.
The software looks GREAT on my QVGA display. 320x240 is terrific for navigation. There are a few spots where things look funky - any place a bitmap of a keypad key (like 1, *, #, etc) is used, it is messed up. It looks like the bitmaps were designed with a 220x176 display’s font spacing in mind. Text lines get crammed more closely together on 320x240, but the bitmaps don’t get resized.
The thing I find most inconvenient (if you are a traveler) is the way Mapopolis uses its mapping data. You download each state one at a time (would have been nice to have a single download). Each state is really a zip file of all the counties in the state. You are supposed to copy the counties you want onto your phone’s storage card, and then you have to manually select the ones that apply you. In my case, I copied Ontario Canada, Washington DC, and Virginia, and it is a huge pain to navigate around this long list. I am going to Seattle this week and will add the Washington counties, and that will make it even worse. In general, how am I supposed to know what county I am in when I am traveling? And you can’t just select all the counties because the POI search function takes forever to return any results. This is a problem they should have solved in the software instead of pushing it to the user.
While I ended on my gripes, I can’t stress enough what a great solution this is. Mapopolis provides a terrific solution – I love it!!