OVI Maps FTW: I took my 5800 (and nexus one) on holiday to ireland, loaded up a local PAYG O2 sim card - I got 3.5G most places, Edge elsewhere. Data was capped at 99 cents a day, perfect for short trips. I had google maps on the 5800, installed the v4 version of google to check out the buzz layer.
My nexus one was on a uk sim so I turned off 3G and data and left it as a regular phone (the battery lasted days like that!!) and I could get data when in wifi areas.
Unfortunately I hadn’t preloaded up the new maps for ireland. But they came in no problem once I had my 3G sim in, this would be an issue if you are roaming. So offline only use wasn’t available for me, pre planning would of sorted that out. Coverage wise the OVI maps for Ireland are way better than google. Every little road (including some that are little more than tracks) are on there, correctly named. Google maps had some wierd naming of areas, it seemed to be using ward names rather than villages, so thumbs down to google maps of Ireland.
The voice guidance had to be download, but was quick (I did this while on the road, my wife was driving). I tried surf dude, which was amusing but highly annoying after five minutes, so switched to uk female, and added street names support too. It’s a lot like the voice from that site that turns scripts into cartoons. So I kept expecting her to ask me if I wanted a Hannah Montana Screensaver.
This was a life saver, and is so much better than the one on my VW touran, which has 5 year old data and nothing outside of the main towns and trunk roads. It kept up well lock wise and was spot on.
The only issue I had was it kept saying too many active data connections, OVI maps was the only app running so it wanted me to close the OVI maps connection! hitting cancel sorted it but it did it a few times.
Battery wise it did well, I had no car charger, it lasted the two 1 1/2 hour journeys with a little to spare, and I took a lot of photos when i arrived. and wasn’t quite fully charged on starting.
This show the greater detail on ovi maps vs google, plus the correct village name, here pallas green is the main location, not shown on google (browser version shown here). But look at the side road details, much greater on OVI. I suspect google will catch up, Ireland has been terrible about releasing map data.
Google maps now has free navigation in the US, so i look forward to that rolling out to europe, though I’ll need another sim :) The main reasons I stuck the local sim in the 5800, were:
- Setting wizard, sorts out all APNs
- JoikuSpot lets me get data on other devices
- Ovi Maps navigation
