[Samsung Infuse 4G] electricpete1:
I haven't used TomTom.

Hope you don't mind me jumping in. Off-line navigation is a subject of great interest to me as I do have a cross country road trip coming up in January. As a result I've been trying out programs.

I have three programs installed in my phone and I have been testing/comparing all three to try to settle on which one I will stick with for off-line use. I've got a spreadsheet of notes... might post it as a review at some time. The three programs are:

Locus Pro (paid $7.00 )

OsmAnd (free)

NavFree (free)

Locus Pro has a ton of features. Complicated but useable. Requires you to be on-line only for as long as it takes to calculate the route (the other two don't require on-line at all). Road labels are small. Road labels disappear when zoom out using vector maps. You can overcome that by downloading tile maps for specific area down to a high zoom level... but if you're looking to cover a wide area such as you night encounter during a cross country trip the tile files would be ridiculously huge.

OsmAnd has somewhat of an elegant interface with lots of features (not as many as Locus, but they're easier to access). But it chokes when you ask it to calculate a route more than 200 miles or so. And road labels are small also.

NavFree is somewhat bare bones. It has the fewest features of the three and missing some features I'd really like.

And yet it is my favorite because of 2 great features:

1 - most readable display. Really striking and easy to read, in both day and night mode.

2 - When zooming out to use the program as a map (for example to see what's 20 miles down the road), the names of the most important roads remain easily visible no matter what zoom level. And you can tap any road to see it's name label. (Locus and OsmAnd don't show most road names if you zoom out to level 13 or beyond... so you can see city names and highways without any names.. and no tap to see name feature.). As a result I can very easily/quickly scroll around while zooming in/out to get a feel for a route/trip/area with NavFree... that's much too frustrating with the other two programs where the road labels disappear when zoomed out.

NavFree has some major missing features:

1 - no ability to force north=up while navigating !!??!! The only choice is that "up" corresopnds to the direction you're driving.

2 - no compass displayed while navigating in the only available mode (up=forward).

Combine 1 and 2 and you are at the mercy of the program while navigating. Tough to get your bearings.

3 - When not navigating, we can force north up. But in this case there is no feature to use the phones compass to tell you which way the car is aligned. I really need that feature when getting started in a strange city from a large parking lot with several entrances... need to orient myself with respect to the map. No tools to do that in NavFree. It only uses car movement and route to orient the car on the screen.

4 - No display of "scale" (one inch = how many miles). Kind of a basic feature for a map.

I have actually built myself a program in Tasker (call it "floating pointer) that displays a pointer floating over the screen to somewhat compensate for deficiencies 1 thru 3 above of NavFree.

The pointer has two user-selectable modes

A - it can point in the direction that my car is pointing on a north-up map (to help me find my way out of parking lots for example). A useful feature same as provided in the other two programs.

B - When navigating in up=north mode, it can figure out which direction is north on that map and point that way (like a compass rose on a rotated map). This compensates slightly for 1 and 2... at least I can mentally figure out what direction I'm traveling in when the phone is navigating in the up=forward mode. If the N arrow points to 9:00 direction, that mean I'm traveling East. If N points to 3:00, I'm traveling West. If N points to 6:00, I'm headed south. Or else just look at the screen and mentally rotate the whole thing so that north arrow is pointing up. Then again it might just be easier to use compass mode (A) as a direct indicator of which direction I'm headed. Then I don't have to mentally rotate the map or reverse East and West... I just have to remember that the direction the compass is pointing acts like a compass indicator of heading and not a compass rose on a rotated map. Either way works. Neither is as good as being able to force north=up.

My floating pointer program is similar to the "floating battery monitor" app that I posted about in the sense that it floats on top of the screen of another program. Unfortunately this one would be tough to turn into an APK for sharing because it uses Python and SL4A which don't get captured in the APK generated by Tasker. So user would need to have Tasker, Python and SL4A installed to run this. (and I'm not sure it's worth all the trouble... still a little clunky... a program that only it's mother would love).