"John Williamson" wrote in message
...
On 23/07/2014 13:46, wrote:
Hi All,

I may be doing a fiar bit of driving in unfamiliar territory soon and
could do with using the iphone (4) as a satnav on occasion. Is there a
free or cheap app which is more efficient in terms of data usage than the
standard offering from Apple (Which I presume downloads maps as you use
them, if I could use an app where preload Surrey maps and it then just
had to work out where it was and where it was going, I presume that would
use less data (i'm a long way off "All you can eat").

TIA

Try playing with the satnavs in PC World, and find out whose interface you
prefer. Most of them do a few versions that will work on most makes of
mobile phones including Apples, and as the maps are all preloaded, they
use no data while you're travelling, unless you've got traffic warnings
enabled.

Or try the Apple equivalent of Google Maps,

Main downside with that is that you can't tell it where to go using Siri.
Siri
uses the apple mapper by default and you can't tell it to use something
else.

Voice commands arent great tho, there are just so many different street
names that Siri doesn't have anything like as much success as it does
with dialing phone numbers from your contacts by voice commands.

I wanted it to go to Waugh St in a country town in the wilds of Australia
and the damned thing kept giving me directions to the New York stock
exchange even when I was in a town on the other side of the world and
named the town as well as the street in the Go To command.

Someone should put a bomb under the fool that programmed that.

I only use about 3 to 5 megabytes of data per day using GM on Android on a
big screen, and a lot of that's the traffic information.

Yeah, I don't see that the data is any big deal unless
you are paying some outrageous data rate like 25c/KB
that you can get when roaming internationally.