Creating & storing maps on your phone

I have an android phone & I have tried various mapping software applications.

My current favourite is Maverick. This is a great free mapping app with access to all sorts of mapping formats even 1:25,000 Ordnance survey maps for the UK.

The trouble most of these solutions is that the maps are requested on demand, so when you are up in the hills you can not get at the data and when you are abroad it will cost you a fortune.

The solution is to get the data before you need it. Most mapping apps store the requested maps as you view them so you can pan around while on wi-fi for the area you are interested in to view when you are up in the hills.

But what if you want maps for a large area. I am off to Spain soon and found it was taking an age to get the maps I wanted so I looked for an alternative solution.

I chose Mobac. This runs on your PC, downloading the maps and converting them to the mapping software of your choice. You select an area, the style of map and the map client software and away you go.

Things to look out for:

1. The more detailed (zoomed in) maps you choose the larger the data. Its pretty well exponential. Avoiding level 16 will save you loads of time & data.
2. Getting the data on to the phone is also a pain. Transferring 1000s of individual files takes an age. I tried the likes of FastCopy but they corrupted the URL of the USB mounted directory of the phone. I ended up zipping up folders of files, copying these to the phone and unzipping.
3. Connecting wifi'ly has made all the difference to data transfer. Much much faster than USB.

The mapping format I have chosen are the excellent OSM cycle map.

Combing maverick with the excellent Gpsies.com is proving excellent.