I have tried all of the GPS apps in the Play Store.
now, after a year of experimenting, there is only one left on my phone.....
( I am not counting Google Maps, that works, but requires Cell Coverage DATA and $$$ on your plan )
The app I refer to is CoPilot USA
- You install the free app,
- Go into Settings and make the extSDcard the default storage location.
Then you get maps..... here you have a lot of options.
- you can select just a small tiny region or state.....
- but, my preference was to download the entire USA in one fell swoop.... you gotta use WiFi because it takes a long time.
The benefit of CoPilot?
No Data use ever again for the life of the phone unless you want to check for an updated map. It does NOT need to see a cell tower ever again.... it uses internal data.
it is the fastest thing on this planet for finding local things, just as fast as using Google on a Desktop PC...
It can plan a trip to a location halfway across the country for you within a few seconds, whereas the Garmin GPS will not allow you to find an address more than about 1 state around your current location ( this made me very mad just 2 weeks ago while traveling by motorcycle thru 11 states )
All of this is totally free..... If you should want "Turn by Turn" audio instructions, there is a one time upgrade fee of $9.99 which I did..... if you do this, CoPilot is the only GPS app I found that will allow you to decide how far in advance you want to be notified of a turn.... not only that, you can establish multiple notifications.
I ride motorcycles a lot and ride in rural cross country areas where the cross roads are usually found just behind a hilltop. Farmers drive their tractors across the road at a snails pace.... having this app alert me that an intersection is "2 miles", "1 miles", " 1/2 mile" also tells me to watch out for tractors in my path.
I just recently went on a 30 day motorcycle vacation. I had a ball....
but what I found was that while the Garmin 2797 GPS was neat for displaying my route, it was not worth a damn at trying to plan longer trips... those more than 350 miles to the destination. It just won't find the address you want regardless of how hard you try.
I would pull out my cellphone at rest stops, open up CoPilot and use it to search the area around me for "Neat Features" to go see.... Garmin can't do that.
I can use the Moving Map feature to drag the map around and look at the details around the local area.... I found some of the neatest "hole in the wall" little community stores you ever saw. One little store that is about 30 feet by 30 feet looks like an Ace Hardware, a grocery store, a Tack and Harness repair shop, a pharmacy and has a gas pump (1) .... this little store was in the middle of nowhere, and it was over an hour to anywhere else that sold anything period.... I was on back roads that twisted like a snake, 35 mph was "fast"... CoPilot was very useful for me.
