was wondering if ovi maps on N900 works without internet connection??

This question has been asked lot of times, if you could just search.
But it works partially, meaning you cannot search for anything(poi, address) without the internet.

It works if you have the map tiles already cached on your device, i.e. used it with internet connection for that area before.
Well, panning the map works in that case.

So the answer is "not really"

Well, you can do everything but search offline, it even routes without internet, you just have to click the destination manyally from the map.

Instructions for downloading maps data locally. Note: I just did this yesterday, it was quick and painless and worked first time out of the box:

http://www.hpsblog.com/2009/07/direc...0-without.html

Ovi Maps does work offline in the sense that if you download your local-area (state/country) maps ahead of time then you can use the following functionality:

1) Locate yourself on the map at all times w/ GPS
2) Zoom in/out of the map and pan
3) Get directions between any two locations on the map, as long as you specify the start-point and end-point on the map itself (as opposed to looking them up as address search terms)

The last part isn't too difficult for most cases. Usually I pick "current GPS location" as the start point, and choosing the end-point is aided by the fact that street addresses are embedded in the map data.

Wherever your cursor is currently located on the map, Ovi Maps will show you the street address for that location. So in a sense if you know the city and street address of the place you're looking for, you can perform your own "search" for the exact location by panning around the map in the general area of the target address. As soon as the address look right (or close to what you want), you can drop a new map "point" at the cursor location. This map point can then be used as the endpoint for directions routing.

It's just odd that Ovi Maps won't perform this address search itself based on the address info in the local maps data -- the data is present locally on the device, but it still wants to go to an external server to look up the lat./long. Seems more computationally expensive to compute best-route instructions, but these it will do locally. Go figure.

thanks for ur answer and sorry for asking b4 searching

http://www.hpsblog.com/2009/07/direc...0-without.html is dead, use this one instead: http://nokiamaps.site666.info

(Use the older maps for 3.0 that the site says work with 3.04 - it is the smaller link, so read the page carefully.)