Notices

Hello everybody.

As I'm new to N900 navigation systems, I'm aware that I might be asking old questions. So please accept my apologies in advance.

I'm a huge hiking fan and I discovered recently that my N900 can actually be used as a good navigation system (GPSJinni showed my latitude when I was 3600 meters high. I felt proud of my phone ^^)

So, I want to know if there is an map application, where I'll be able to PRE-LOAD OpenStreetMaps in my N900 before I go to hiking, as mostly there are no coverage ares where I can use 3G for navigation.

Thank you in advance.

There are quite a few.

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Nokia_N900

You can preload them with Modrana.

The question is what you mean by "preload". There are quite some applications (e.g. Marble, Mappero) that can preload maptiles.
If you want to preload OSM vector data then your only option is Navit afaik (please correct me if I'm wrong!).

There is also the monav client which supports vector maps and offfline routing. See:
http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=74791

Thanks! I didn't know that monav is more than a background daemon.
Does it support indirect routing, either by adding more waypoints or by dragging the initial route? That's what I miss most in Navit.

By preloading I mean downloading maps of the area before I actually go out. There are mostly no coverage areas above 3500+ meters high, so I'm not always being able to use my network to download maps.

Anyway, I'm kind of dissapointed. There's no reliable software for N900 YET I can depend my group on.

?

Have you tried the ones that were suggested in previous posts? ModRana, as recommended by one above, gives you the opportunity to pre-download maps. From home (assuming you have Internet connection), just turn on the app and scroll over the area and it downloads it for you on-the-fly (do it from your home first before going out). Or...in the Options menu, there's a button for you to download maps. You can even choose the main map and layer (OSM, Google Maps, etc.).

CloudGPS looks like a good one too, and makes use of OSMTracker format. If you are not comfortable downloading directly from the N900 (via ModRana, for example), just check out the thread (use Search function) and on Page 1 there are instructions on how to pre-download and "make" your own map for use.

I've been using CloudGPS for a while, I didn't know it was possible to use pre-downloaded maps. I think I found the right app.

Thank you.

iDavid, I used mappero for hiking. It's fantastic! You can preload openstreetmap for any area or route. For some places, openstreetmap has better mapping of hiking routes than any other source. I loaded the whole of Tenerife onto my N900 and had some great hiking adventures. It can also preload other tiles based on openstreetmap, such as hike bike map or open cycle map.

Here's a tip: the pixels on the N900 are quite small, and some text on openstreet map can be hard to read. So I preload only the even-numbered zoom levels (6, 8, 10 and 12). In the field, if I zoom to an odd-numbered zoom level, the N900 will scale up the map and the text becomes very easy to read.