Notices

I had to do a road trip in country Victoria yesterday, and thought I'd give the N900 ovi maps application a run to see how well it would do at finding my way.

Up to now I'd used maemo-mapper on my N800, combined with a Nokia bluetooth GPS unit, and found it very reliable.

Initially it seemed to work OK, it was able to find the destinations, and the N900 was much better at finding street addresses than maemo-mapper was [maemo-mapper only works if you get it exactly right, whereas ovi maps gives you options as you type]

It also had a 3d view for following the route which is visually nice.

The problems arose however, when two things happened: 1. I didn't check the route against a normal map, and 2. The GPS started dropping out mid-route leaving me unable to figure out where I was. It was also giving me unreliable locations (ie. it said I was somewhere else - off by hundreds of metres, possibly kilometres, it was hard to tell).

It turned out that the most obvious highway route was not chosen, and it sent me through the back streets. I then ended up partway through the route, when the location was lost. My red dot was no longer on the road I had been following, and it was trying to send me down an unsealed road, which I thought unusual. Then the GPS dropped out completely, and I was completely stranded.

Eventually, after some mucking around, following my nose a little, trying to stay on sealed roads going in roughly the right direction, I decided to give up, and go back to the trusty N800, which I had brought with me as a backup.

As soon as I had set that up, it downloaded the maps, figured out a route, and I was able to find my way out. Very reliable indeed. Maemo mapper also has onscreen instructions as you drive which ovi-maps didn't.

I was extremely disappointed at how unreliable the built-in GPS was in the N900, and will not be relying on it again. The mapping application looks like it could be really good, but lacks some fundamentals.

I had a similar trip to from Melbourne to Warrnambool a few weeks ago. I used OVI maps, but the only difference was that I had already downloaded the whole map of australia to the device so that it didn't need to download over the air. It did take me down some back roads, but I found it actually took me a quicker way. Worked fine the whole trip.

Did you try Maemo-mapper or Maep or navit on the N900?

There is no use of downloading map on n900, there is no offline mode availability or atleast no one has figured out. I tried using gps on n900 and it really sucks ..the new maps on my 5800 work way better than this.

To be honest, not maemo mapper, but I might give it a try - I wasn't aware that it was really production ready in the new OS. I was hoping that the built in map application would do the trick. I have to say, though, that it was probably the failure of the GPS that was the real problem. The other think I wanted to try was hook up my bluetooth GPS to the N900, but I had problems doing that. Maybe if I persist with that I can give the N900 another go

I don't think maep does route planning. I'll have a look at navit.

Uh what? I have the full map of my province, stored to my N900. It does not do OTA downloading and provides me with proper routing - provided I have a GPS signal. What are you on about?