I recently had to get a new phone as my old one is having trouble with the battery and charging and all that kind of stuff. I got the old phone for bike-ish reasons so I’d have a then state-of-the-art 2M pixel camera in a phone for PBP 2007
This time, being a bit of a geek I got an Android phone. This type of phone can do some mapping and I was interested to find out how good it was.
At the weekend I did the test ride for my 400km event the “Avalon Sunrise”. This was checking the routesheet. And as I now had something to try it with, checking the GPS track too.
I have for years used pages torn out of a old road atlas as my “backup” maps when I am out riding events. All the events I ride use a routesheet with turn by turn instructions. If I misread something or miss a turn then a map is handy to have.
On the test ride though, I just took the Android phone. I’d prepared by loading the gpx files into the google maps service, and then emailing the urls back to the android phone. There is probably a more elegant way to achieve a linkup to the route trace but this worked.
Opening the url from the email brought up an Android google map with the route drawn on as a line. As you can imagine, when checking new instructions on a routesheet this is quite useful. The phone guesses where you are by triangulating from the cell phone masts it can pick up. There is a marker at your approximate position. The approximate position is plenty good enough for this sort of navigation. It also has a proper GPS locator in it that uses the proper satellites. This uses more battery up so I normally have it switched off but turning it on seems to give a very accurate fix quite quickly.
I still don’t like the idea of GPS as such, telling me where to go. And a lot of the fiddling about with computer files that seems to go with GPS isn’t my idea of fun either. But using a simple google map instead of a road atlas as the “backup” map works ok for me!
Welcome to the ersatz GPS club, vorsprung! http://www.cyclechat.net/blog/74/entry-262-iphone-gps-test/
By: Mike on May 13, 2011
at 9:22 pm
Hey,
Following your suggestions I’ve been doing similar (to avoid getting lost on my piddly 30 mile rides in the New Forest!), but now (I guess google maps for android has improved a bit!) accessing the maps via the layers menu and my maps which I guess saves faffing with emails and URLs.
How’s it working for you? Got any more tips? I’ve been using ‘prefetch map cache’ to save battery by letting me turn the data off (other than GPS).
Dave
By: Dave Nice (@davenice) on September 2, 2011
at 3:13 pm
Yes, I’ve been using the layers feature to access “my maps”. Not sure about the caching effectiveness but it’s a nice idea
By: audaxing on September 4, 2011
at 12:56 pm
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at 9:56 am
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By: More New Gear « Audaxing on May 18, 2012
at 11:57 am
How did you get the GPX files into GoogleMaps?
By: oranj on May 19, 2012
at 2:15 pm
I may have tweaked the xml slightly but they basically “just worked”
I tried to do one the other week and it came out a bit mangled, with lots of crap that made it difficult to use as a trace
My spies tell me that converting to kml, the google earth format is the way to go, haven’t tried this yet
By: audaxing on May 21, 2012
at 10:41 am
Ah no, I was thinking more – where is the “button” (or menu or whatever) on Google Maps that allows you to import a GPX file?
By: oranj on May 21, 2012
at 1:41 pm
ok this is how I do it
1) “login” to google
2) go to “http://maps.google.co.uk/”
3) click on “My Places” top of LH bar
4) “Create Map”
5) “import” ( hyperlink between “collaborate” and buttons for “Done” “Saved”)
Hope this helps 🙂
By: audaxing on May 21, 2012
at 1:52 pm
Ah ha! Got it, thanks!
By: oranj on May 21, 2012
at 2:07 pm
[…] used an Android GPS equipped phone as a back up map and way of getting back on track when lost for a while. But I recently got a […]
By: Garmin Gripes « Audaxing on September 11, 2012
at 12:38 pm
Beware! The mapping programs don’t always have updates for road works, floods, etc., so it’s hard to reroute yourself when suddenly you find a closed or damaged road. And good luck finding a paper map any more. It’s important to study the online map the night before, to get a sense of where you’ll be and what alternatives you might have.
By: Xena on November 23, 2022
at 6:17 pm