Thinking of buying bluetooth GPS and have a question. With Maemo mapper can I do a search for like McDonalds and it will search for the closets ones? Or is it strickly enter point A to point B? Tried looking on site and could not find. Thanks

for the most part you have to have an address, or GPS coordinates in order to find a place. you may want to look into pySearch which will give you that kind of info (address, gps) based on a yahoo keyword search of "mcdonalds". you can then copy/paste the info into the correct dialog in maemo mapper, and have it download a route to that place or simply center over it.

best bet is to install the app and hack away at it, and see what functionality it has that best suits your needs.

so this app is not like a garmin GPS unit? Or with the bluetooth GPS is there a better app to use that I can do searches and stuff

the navicore offering seems to have more "commercially available options" that most other GPS devices offer. the feature set of the navicore app resemble that of Garmin or TomTom, and like them is a closed source, proprietary subscription based service.

mapper has plenty of functionality, including voice prompted turn-by-turn directions and the ability to use different map repositories for topograhical or streetmap-over-satellite hybrid type views. above all, the app is free and the guy who is writing the app is accessible, open to suggestions and posts here frequently.

Last question is I only need the internet to download maps? After that you just need GPS and thats it?

yes, you have to cache the maps before they are available. this is done a couple of ways. you have the ability to download them in bulk, or along a route you downloaded in the mapper application itself.

you can also look into winmapper, which is a windows based app that will download the map tiles for you and organize them into the way maemo mapper expects to find them. from there you just copy the folders to the card in your nokia over usb.

once you have the maps cached on the device, you can connect your GPS via bluetooth and begin tracking where you've been.

note that if you have a 770, the RS-MMC style card is limited to 2GB at this point. if you have an n800 the SD cards come in up to 8GB in size. that is more or less the limit of the maps you can keep on the device. you will notice that some maps require less space than others. this is due to the resolution and overall clarity of the tiles from the repository. google earth has nice clear bright color tiles, where virtual earth has more of a grey scale and muted tile.