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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.

google map on HTC Wildfire

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!

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