iphone as a sat nav abroad?

[DaleC]

Well i'm afraid thats not my experience or that of many others i know. I have no data signal in my back garden and cannot get a GPS fix on my phones.

Mike

Mike101, as mentioned above certain SatNav applications (TomTom, CoPilot, OSMAnd et al) do not work by using data/mobile phone signal. You can turn the phone reception off as the applications use offline maps and the GPS receiver and as such require no mobile phone signal at all and also avoiding roaming charges.

In fact, the latest iteration of Google maps allows you to plan your route while you have signal and will cache this for you to use offline (and will talk you through the route). However, it will not "assist" you to get back on the route should you lose it. I tested it for laughs on a run from Austria to London on my tablet (with OSMAnd running in the background) and it worked amazingly well. To put that into perspective, my tablet does not have a sim card.

As others have said, the upside to using your phone with an offline routing app is that you do not require another device and therefore, avoiding a material investment. The downside is that it requires power, they are not always as robust as a dedicated GPS device and as sexysi says, I like the redundancy of having my phone available with power should an emergency occur.

For what it's worth, I have used TomTom over the last 7 years in mobile phone including a number of continental wanders on the bike. These days though, I use my Garmin hiking GPS for the bike and the phone in the car - works fine. (thumbs)

[AustinW]

I tried using my iPhone 3Gs as a sat nav with TomTom a few years ago. It does work with data roaming off.

Not a good experience generally though mainly as the power consumption makes the device very hot and it switches off just when you need it. Also remember to lock orientation else vibration or bumps or cornering will have it constantly switching. Final downside is that the screen is too small and you can't use it with gloves on.

The tomtom app though is a really good one.


Sent from my iPhone with a smile

[Mike54]

Well i'm afraid thats not my experience or that of many others i know. I have no data signal in my back garden and cannot get a GPS fix on my phones.

Mike

Mike, what I suggest you do is download an app called "gps status". turn off your mobile data and wifi , open the app outside and see if it gets a lock, which I'm confident it will. Remember you wont get anything if you're trying to get gps status using a map which needs to download

[markoh]

I've used Tom Tom Europe on an iPhone and it works very well The winding roads route finding is particularly good.

[Kenbo]

I have used my phone as sat nav for about 2 years with the Sygic app. Data roaming switchd of and no bills
However about 2 months before my contact was up the sat nav stopped working. All other functions on the phone were fine. I assume all the vibrations from the bike had destroyed the sat nav inside the phone.

[londonwelsh]

Lol- seems it wasn't as simple a question as previously thought! Many thanks guys, looks promising. Maps will still rule (thumbs)

[ZX Raziel]

Maps will never run out of battery , always good to have one as a backup , but a satnav its miles better ( if it works :pinch: ) .
Tomtom on a phone its equaly good to a tomtom satnav and they both need juice to run , so the phone seems a good option because its multifunctional device that saves you carrying loads of gadgets around , but then again some of us love gadgets (thumbs)

[ChasF]

Another map lover here! I saw this thread and as I was just off to Spain for a few days I thought I'd give it a go. Looked at the GPS apps available but as they seem to cost money I decided to stick with google maps. It's an Orange phone with a free data plan (in France - iphone4). From here (north Dordogne) I set a route for Castres. I ignored it for the first hour or so as I knew the way and then when I looked it had flattened the battery. Plugged it into the charger and it worked a treat in Castres itself where our hotel was tucked away in the back streets, we'd have been there for hours trying to find it without the GPS. The next day we set off towards Carcassonne to pick up the autoroute. It was a bit of a late start for various reasons so getting quite hot. After half an hour the display went off, the phone is in the map case on the tank bag. When I took it out it felt warm, pushed the button and a message came up saying the phone had shut down due to overheating. A proper mount would probably overcome this but all I was able to do was to try to get a bit more air into the map holder. Anyway, didn't need the GPS on the motorway but when we stopped for some lunch just south of Narbonne I programmed in the name of the hotel in Barcelona and it told me it was 2hrs50mins. Stopped at the border and turned roaming off and then stopped for fuel about 100km north of Barcelona I put the phone back in the map holder hoping to navigate straight to the hotel. It was all going well, we were going along alongside the Avenue Diagonal, it was hard to tell if we should be on the big road or whether we could continue on the small road running parallel because the blue line is actually wider than both roads together. I decided I should be on the Diagonal proper and at the next opportunity went down a slip road. The first thing that happens is we go through a tunnel and lose the signal. When we came out of the tunnel it took 30 seconds or so to lock back on just in time for me to see the blue line disappear up the slip road I'd just passed. We took the next exit and meandered around some small residential streets whilst the GPS flashed 'head east' and then 'rerouting'. We eventually found ourselves outside Barca FC but we didn't have a street map so it wasn't much help. Turned on roaming and it navigated us to the hotel with any further problems.

I set the route up to take us up to Andorra whilst still on the hotel wifi. When we started to work our way out of town it very quickly lost lock. I turned on roaming and it navigated us back to the tunnels. This time it was very slow but fortunately so were the traffic lights and it generally caught up with itself at the red lights. We were soon back in the tunnels (where there no 3G or satellite signal) and after several runs back and forth up the same section of the Diagonal I realised that the exit we wanted was in the middle of a long tunnel. Once we were out in the open air on our way towards Berga I turned the roaming off and it all worked fine. I didn't bother with it again because the navigation was straightforward.

I've yet to see what the roaming charges will be but from this experience and previous experiences with a conventional GPS, the conventional GPS with on board maps and a bigger screen wins hands down. The phone is handy for occasional use if you're not paying a fortune for data.