How do people manage their maps? I won't be using the 770 'online' whilst on the road and therefore want to predownload as much as possible. I've tried doing a download along a popular route (Plymouth to London) but it was taking so long I had to cancel it.

Is there a better way to predownload? Is it possible to get all maps for the UK? If so how big would that download be?

Lastly are there any tips for the optimal zoom levels to download?

You can use this application to download your maps on your computer and then transfer them on the memory card.
-i

Awesome, I was just about to write an app to do that

OMG, thank you!! Thank you!! :)

What's the best way to get maps for say all of London? The following link seems to cover much of Greater London:

EDIT:

Ok so I didn't realise this and maybe a few others didn't:

In Maemo Mapper if you zoom out to encompass an area you wish to download it will determine the top left and bottom right coordinates. You can then set the download area zoom level to the desired level (eg 2) and it will get all the maps required.

It works through a proxy server for me. OS2006, v1.1. I set the proxy in the advanced settings for my connection (http, https, ftp) and it's working right now.

Good hint! I backuped my 512mb RS-MMC, reformatted with VFAT32 using 1kb cluster size, and restored it. Before it used 8kb cluster size, which was a big waste with map tiles. My maps repository shrank by 35%. Before my MMC was >90% full, now it is only 75% full.

Before (8kb sector):

/media/mmc1 $ du -ks .??* *
144 .archive
8 Audio clips # this is an empty directory!
46768 backups
4480 Documents
2144 Images
395296 maemo-mapper
11928 supertux
192 tuxpaint

After (1kb sector):

/media/mmc1 $ du -ks .??* *
86 .archive
1 Audio clips # this is an empty directory!
46675 backups
3813 Documents
2033 Images
293338 maemo-mapper
7783 supertux
120 tuxpaint

Maemo-Mapper's cousins for PSP and Nintendo DS
 

PlayStation Portabel (PSP) now has an application similiar to Maemo-Mapper:

http://www.pspaccess.net/modules.php...rticle&sid=595
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_nitCHViaCU

And Nintendo DS:

http://www.natrium42.com/blog/?p=31

Some features of these might be interesting for Maemo-Mapper.

Today I received my new 2GB Kingston MMC, so I backed up my maps
from a 1GB card (fromatted with FAT32 and logical sector size 512 bytes)

The 1 GB card:
/dev/sdc1 1017268 761980 255288 75% /USBc1

The (uncompressed) backup file (ls -l):
584038400 2006-08-25 12:50 Maps.tar

I tested the new 2 GB card via
fsck -v /dev/sdc1
and was told that the logical sector size is 512 bytes.

So I untared the backup and to my surprise the MMC card was full, before everything was backed up.

That was the time when I realized that the minimum allocation size for a file is cluster size (which was 32KB) and not logical sector size.

By formatting the card with
mkfs.vfat -S 512 -s 1 /dev/sdc1
one achieves 512 bytes logical sector size (-S 512) and 1 logical sector per cluster (-s 1), and therefore 512 bytes per cluster.

After restoring my tar file, it took only 27% of disk space:

The 2 GB card:
/dev/sdc1 2007789 534883 1472906 27% /USBc1

The bad news: my Nokia phone (symbian) cannot read the card any more :(

For generating routes and directions can anyone point me to a site that allows you to specify a preference for certain roads or ways to your destination?

Google generates one route but I'd prefer to travel a slightly different route but have no options available to specify waypoints.