offmaps

Don't buy, it is a total rip-off. It only allows you to look at areas that you have alread looked at (prety obvious) when you are offline. The standard Apple Maps app lets you do this, so what is the point in buying this?

 

Apple Maps lets you store locally areas you've looked at before?!

 

That would be news to me. If it has a cache at all it is extremely limited. Switch your phone into airplane mode and see what comes up in Maps. Actually, I was the one mentioning a need for this kind of app just a few days ago. The most recent horror story I heard is; someone I know was in Japan last week and he flipped the roaming switch to 'quickly' use the maps as not to incur excessive roaming charges. His bill this month was about $350 higher than usual.

MotionX GPS and GPS Kit both have a cache that saves viewed areas for offline use. That is, unfortunately, not as convenient as one might think. Manually fingering around an area is time consuming and if you want different zoom levels, you must do a second or third or fourth... pass as well. I am going to try this one out just because I really need something like this. Here I go... sploosh.

 

Yeah, I have an iPhone and I am not using it as a phone - I don't have a sim card in it (don't ask me why, I just do). So it is basically an iPhone minus the calls, texts and 3G. I just have wi-fi, so I can turn the wi-fi off on my iPhone and still look at areas that I have already looked at on my iPhone. The cache doesn't seem to be too limited - I can look at most places that I have visited - my house, my area, places in America, Iraq, Greenland etc (don't ask me why I have been looking at those places either ). I am suprised that nobody here knew that this was possible, or is my iPhone just very gifted?

 

I can't say I understand it. I have tried and had very different results than yourself. Lucky son of a gun

 

My experience with Offmaps

I am pleased to report that I love this app and anyone who travels will love this app. The easy to use interface offers a surprisingly gracious helping of options to effectively acquire all the maps you might need.

First, however, if you think 2 GB of memory for the entire Wikipedia database seems like a lot, check out picture 1. I'm afraid you will have to wait a little longer for that 600 GB model iDevice if you want an offline map of all of Japan. A more realistic selection is shown in picture 2. And picture 3 is just to confirm it does work offline.

You can't tell from the screens (because I am not in Japan) that a GPS locator beacon shows your position for the full modern-day-map experience. As well as selected areas being saved for offline viewing, any map you view while online will also be cached (just in case.)

Limitations I have encountered are that a search within the app is only as specific as street, city, or country. When you are offline, it is limited to bookmarked locations only (so at least bookmark some known wireless hotspots if you want access to all the features you are used to.) All I am saying is; even though this is the perfect traveler's companion, don't get rid of the built in Maps just yet.

Thanks for the link, soup.

EDIT: This just occurred to me: I am going to write the dev and suggest a minimum zoom slider. I can't think of a reason I would need an extreme wide map of Japan; city level would do nicely, thank you.

 

wow, I think I'll get this too!

Thanks again to Starjimstar and Soup for bringing this up! I can seehow this is going to be so damn useful going abroad and avoid paying huge roaming bills (like when I did in Spain during my honeymoon!). It will even help my 2G iPhone when looking up locations locally because edge my telco is on GPRS!

For those wanting a video demo, see their website at http://www.offmaps.com/video-offline-maps-iPhone.htm

VERY impressive! Their first day took them to 44th spot in German app store! (just released yesterday)