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I recently bought a TomTom Bluetooth GPS receiver to play around with for a project I’m working on. Since I had it I decided to try out a few mobile apps for mapping and navigation. The mobile I tested on was a Sony Ericsson K550 which is a midrange phone with a standard GPRS connection (the phone has EDGE but my carrier is Vodafone doesn’t do EDGE, and I’m still holding out for a HSDPA smart phone with querty keys + touchscreen + wifi). So the point is I wanted to find out what works on an average phone.

(1) GMM Google Maps for Mobile:

GMM is a freely available Java midlet. It supports GPS for a limited number of devices that have in built GPS but doesn’t do bluetooth GPS but it does provide you with basic google maps functionality: i.e. find a location or get directions from a to b, in map view or satellite view. I found the zooming in/out to be extremely slow and hard on my bandwidth. Just zooming in and then scrolling through my neighourhood resulted in a few hundred kilobytes of data in a matter of seconds… not exactly what you want from your mobile mapping software.

(2) Mobile Gmaps:

Mobile Gmaps is another freely available Java midlet. This mapping app lets you choose what mapping provider you want to use for the mapping: Yahoo, Windows Live, Ask.com or Open Street Map. The funny thing here is that it is named Gmaps but they no longer have google maps as a choice for mobile mapping provider. It worked no problem with my TomTom GPS device and found me on the map. However I had the same problem as with the Google maps app, regardless of the provider moving and zooming on the maps was brutally slow. It’s becoming very clear that if an app just pulls the maps from the web and doesn’t do any optimization for the phone you really need 3G for it to function reasonably. The most interesting part of this piece of software is the “Services” or better said, content layers you can choose from to display on the map. It allows you to add content from Subway Maps, WikiMapia - user generated points of interest info, FON - free wireless hotspots, Traffic Info, and any Google earth KML file. This is really the holy grail of mobile mapping. If you are going to have rich content that scales and is useful to any user, the user needs to be able to choose the layers that are of interest, and if you have a whole community of participants adding to and keeping the info up to date you can bet that it’ll beat the info any mapping provider can provide, at least in the long term.

(3) Wayfinder 7:

I came across this Java app on the Fun+Downloads section pre-programmed into my phone by Sony Ericsson. This software is not free but you get a free 30 day trial. I installed it and it worked instantly with my TomTom GPS device, showing me exactly where I was in Amsterdam. The maps and content layers are provided by TeleAtlas. What was very impressive is that I could zoom and move around the maps naturally unlike my earlier experiences. The maps are still coming in over the net and are not-preinstalled, but they clearly have been optimized in some way (i.e. maybe they are vector based so maps and content layers are separate pieces) so it’s not so hard on the band width. The funny thing about the content layers is when I was looking at Amsterdam fairly zoomed out, the only POI that show up on the map are churches and gas stations… don’t know why churches have such a big priority, but anyways… when I actually zoom in I do get bars and restaurant POI. Wayfinder has many other features including voice directions, optimizing directions for pedestrians or cars, or toll vs non-toll roads, and it will even warn you about speed cameras, so this can be used on foot or in the car. Overall this is by far the best mapping solution I’ve found so far for my midrange mobile phone. I only wish I could find something free that is similar in quality ;-).

BTW I highly recommend the TomTom Bluetooth GPS receiver. It takes about a minute to get an initial lock, but once it has the lock it doesn’t lose it and I’m free to put it in my pocket, jump on my bike, and ride around recording my route or using my mapping software.

I will try to evaluate other mapping software as I find it. Please feel free to recommend something if you have a favourite.