Glop

There are a good few java applications out there for mobile phones that offer some sort of GPS support. I’ve played with a few, and even payed for one.(I am a schmuck) I’ll quickly mention the ones I’ve used and describe what they can do. What I was really interested in was the ability to download large maps and save them onto my phone’s memory card. The alternative is to download the maps via GPRS as you go, and given Irish mobile phone service providers GPRS costs, this isn’t feasible.

There are some issues though with using downloaded maps, or saving cached maps to the filesystem. The first is Google themselves, (if using Google Maps) the offline caching of maps is, I think, against their terms and conditions, as demonstrated by them requesting this chap to take his application offline.

The second issue is with the phones themselves. My phone at least requires explicit permission from a user when an application wants to access the filesystem. This is fine, great security you say, except that it wants permission every, single, time. So if you download some maps that are split into tiles, ala Google Maps, it needs to issues at least 4 or 5 requests per display ! Painful. The only way to get around this is to get the jar signed, or to load data into the jar file itself. Getting the jar signed costs money, circa $500 it seems, and loading up the jar files is awkward, with no automated tools for doing it. So anyway, the following are the application I’ve looked at.

Mobile GMaps.

http://www.mgmaps.com

Mobile GMaps was initially written to display Google Maps but has extended to include support for a number of other online map sources and GPS devices. It is a Java application, so will run on any reasonably modern java enabled phone.

The MGMaps interface is very good, nice and tidy, with plenty of support for various settings. Always on backlight (which doesn’t work on my SE K750i phone), full screen, bookmarks, a proxy script.

What it doesn’t do is provide support for route tracking, satellite information display, extended information such as Height etc. It also does not support the loading of map data from the local memory storage.

MGMAps is excellent for viewing googlemap data, and searching for locations, however as a general purpose GPS client/tool, the lack of route recording tools makes it useless.

TrekBuddy

When I wanted to record my routes on the bicycle, my brother pointed me at an application called TrekBuddy. From the website http://www.linuxtechs.net/kruch/tb/forum/index.php the details are

The NMEA output is good, the smart GPX can be a bit dodgy. I tried it on the LUAS and appeared to travel through a number of houses, which was a bit odd. The offline map support is there, but getting a map and calibrating it is awkward. What I really want is just a tool that will allow me to download Google Maps and stick them on my phone, no messing about ! TrekBuddy should be able to display these maps alright, it’s just a matter of formating them correctly.

Nav4All

http://www.nav4all.com

Nav4all is slightly different from the above in that it is a more professional offering. Rather than a map displaying application, Nav4all is more like a complete GPS solution, focusing on providing directions to locations. The map coverage is extensive, using their own database, with a comprehensive POI database too.

The interface isn’t fantastic, however it does offer audio prompts for when driving. The application is very good, as a GPS alternative to the likes of TomTom, but as yet doesn’t spport tracking and tracing, so no NMEA or GPX output. There is also no support for using downloaded maps, however given that it is not downloading raster maps, but rather vector maps of locations, the amount of data downloaded over GPRS isn’t too bad. Also, the application is currently completely free !

As a map viewer, it’s ok, as a complete GPS package, for free, it’s very good.

J2meMap

http://j2memap.landspurg.net/

Another application along the lines of MGMaps and TrekBuddy. This has support for route saving/loading, but I couldn’t get it working. There are some other interesting features such as taking photos and being able to GPS tag them for uploading to Flickr. This sounds good, but unfortunately it couldn’t seem to take advantage of the 750i’s complete camera features, restricting the image size, focus etc. There is talk on the forums about loading up the cache directory with predownloaded maps, but again, it appears to be an awkward process. The interface isn’t the greatest and the application can’t handle the permission related problems very well, with constant requests entering into a loop it’s impossible to get out of without forcing an application exit.

It’s a decent map viewier, but with the filesystems permission problem, it can be very painful.

GPSWatch

http://www.i10n.com/

I was getting a bit tired at this stage of all the various applications, none of which did exactly what I wanted. A simple app that can display offline maps, display the recorded route as an overlay and export this data in a NMEA or GPX format. And also to have no messing about with filesystem permissions. I didn’t even mind paying a bit of cash for an application that did all this. Amazing I know, a pauper student willing to fork out cash for a program. One of the forums had a post mentioning GPSWatch and that it supported downloading of Google Maps and loading with permission questions. Great !

I went to the website, they listed all the various features, everything I wanted. The demo was ok, seemed to do the job, so payed for the application. 25 Euro. First thing I noticed after I payed was that I didn’t have the application, no automated download, nothing. It seems I had to wait for the company to email me asking what phone I had, then they would send it out. That’s bollix I thought. I went to the website forums and saw people complaining that they had payed for the app and taken ages to recieve it. More bollix I thought.

Eventually, after several unanswered emails, I got the application. Apparently the company had been off at a wedding. I guess these things happen (?!?!). At this stage, I was a bit suspicious about what exactly I had bought and I wasn’t too surprised to get something that was fairly crap. The interface is poor, a number of the features are ridiculous including an acceleration measurer to test how fast your car can get to 100 miles an hour. The application doesn’t do full screen, doesn’t display route taken over the map and of course still has the file permission request problem. No signed jar here. The offline downloader is a java command line app which runs with the arguments:

Usage: getmaps ‘start latitude’ ‘start longitude’ ‘end latitude’ ‘end longitude’ ‘map type’ ‘start zoomlevel’ ‘end zoomlevel’ ‘destination folder’

Not quite the simple GUI tool I was hoping for.
In short, it was somewhat disappointing. Avoid until they have developed into something more substantial, if ever. At least I get free updates, (what joy), so if they ever make something decent of it, I’ll be able to use it.

In general MGMaps is the tool with the best interface and TrekBuddy the tool with most useful offline map ability. Nav4All is great as a general pupose GPS solution, at least while free. I’m just going to have to wait a while for a mobile phone tool that does exactly what I want, or write something myself to create the maps I want.

One possible solution is to write a simple webserver for the k750i that is able to load google maps from the memory card and make them available to the MGMaps tool via its proxy setting. The security problem could be overcome by storing the files in the httpserver jar.. Still have to download the right Google Maps though..

RSS Feeds from the above mentioned applications :

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 5th, 2006 at 8:48 pm and is filed under GPS. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.