I had to do a road trip in country Victoria yesterday, and thought I'd give the N900 ovi maps application a run to see how well it would do at finding my way.

Up to now I'd used maemo-mapper on my N800, combined with a Nokia bluetooth GPS unit, and found it very reliable.

Initially it seemed to work OK, it was able to find the destinations, and the N900 was much better at finding street addresses than maemo-mapper was [maemo-mapper only works if you get it exactly right, whereas ovi maps gives you options as you type]

It also had a 3d view for following the route which is visually nice.

The problems arose however, when two things happened: 1. I didn't check the route against a normal map, and 2. The GPS started dropping out mid-route leaving me unable to figure out where I was. It was also giving me unreliable locations (ie. it said I was somewhere else - off by hundreds of metres, possibly kilometres, it was hard to tell).

It turned out that the most obvious highway route was not chosen, and it sent me through the back streets. I then ended up partway through the route, when the location was lost. My red dot was no longer on the road I had been following, and it was trying to send me down an unsealed road, which I thought unusual. Then the GPS dropped out completely, and I was completely stranded.

Eventually, after some mucking around, following my nose a little, trying to stay on sealed roads going in roughly the right direction, I decided to give up, and go back to the trusty N800, which I had brought with me as a backup.

As soon as I had set that up, it downloaded the maps, figured out a route, and I was able to find my way out. Very reliable indeed. Maemo mapper also has onscreen instructions as you drive which ovi-maps didn't.

I was extremely disappointed at how unreliable the built-in GPS was in the N900, and will not be relying on it again. The mapping application looks like it could be really good, but lacks some fundamentals.