There are a couple of items I would love to see added to the software reviews.
1) How are the Maps organized? a)County by County b) East/West US, c) State by State
2) Is there a choice to "make your own maps"
3) Is there any limitation on the amount of maps you can have loaded at once? Does the software support "dynamic loading of maps"
4) How do you go about creating the route/figuring out what maps you need?
For example. Mapopolis is county by county. I would like to drive from SF to LA..How the HECK would I figure out how many/which counties I would go through?
I will be reviewing Pocketmap Navigator and Mapopolis Navigator on this site in the next few weeks. I'll keep your suggestions in mind!
A couple of things I can tell you already. Mapopolis maps are organized by county, although there are "major roads" maps for each state.
As far as I know, none of the "biggies" (Mapopolis, PMN, Routis, etc.) allow you to make your own maps. However, some other programs (GPS Dash, Fugawi, and some others) will let you do this.
Mapopolis has a limitation based on the population of the counties being loaded (20 million, I think).
With Mapopolis all routing is done on the PPC, and both the starting and ending points must be onscreen. With PMN routine can be done either on the PPC or on a desktop machine.
Originally posted by ZappCatt There are a couple of items I would love to see added to the software reviews.
1) How are the Maps organized? a)County by County b) East/West US, c) State by State
2) Is there a choice to "make your own maps"
3) Is there any limitation on the amount of maps you can have loaded at once? Does the software support "dynamic loading of maps"
4) How do you go about creating the route/figuring out what maps you need?
For example. Mapopolis is county by county. I would like to drive from SF to LA..How the HECK would I figure out how many/which counties I would go through?
THANKS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
For Routis :
1. Two CDROM's (East/West) with State by State maps.
2. Yes, in a radius up to 125 miles of any point.
3. No, maps are loaded when the software starts.
4. Use the desktop software to figure out the states you need. Do the routing on the Axim. (It's quick.)
For the Mapopolis question, it has a "Major roads" version of all of California. Use that to plan the route, then add the counties at the start and end (where most of the turns are to get to the freeways). It also shows the counties you traverse, if you want to load them all.
tgreenstein said, "With Mapopolis all routing is done on the PPC, and both the starting and ending points must be onscreen." That is not technically accurate. Both origin and destination must be on the maps in memory, but you can enter addresses and nav from one to another that way without either being on the screen. The map can be zoomed in after it displays the entire route to whatever scale you want.
AWESOME!!!
Thanks for the quick responces..As you can tell I am fired up about GPS...
Now more questions..
1) Mapopolis-"major roads versions" you load this into the PPC, start the app, figure out the counties and then download those to the PPC? Or is there a desktop component?
Do the counties say what their population is? Just wondering, since the drive I am contemplating is 5 hours, I never know when I will get hungry, bored, etc and might want to stop...
2) Routis-In practice, how many maps can you load at once? Is it a storage issue, or RAM for the app? I have seen the tips about downloading maps, renaming folders, etc..but that seems like a waste of time.
Personally, I've never hit the 20 million limit, and it's pretty easy to figure out which county to use. I have Maps and Streets on my laptop, and it shows county names. I do an initial routing there, look at the counties, then pick those counties for download in Mapopolis. Works pretty well. There are also some ways to get maps of counties from some internet sources, but I've never used them.
For Routis it's both for limitations. You can only store on your machine what you have space to hold, and once you get the map there it has to load into memory. I think it dynamically gets parts from the card, as the maps are generally larger than the memory space I have available. Right now the map on my Axim (all of Virginia) is about 25 Mbytes. That fits in memory, but so does a map of 125 miles radius of my house, which is larger than the RAM I have available, so somehow Routis looks like it is dynamically reading the map.
I actually have used a similar trick to figure out the counties for Mapopolis.I use Microsoft Mappoint 2002..but so far have only tried a 100 mile trip..It was 4 counties in Texas...I do not think I have the patience to step through my trip from SF to LA and count out all the counties..and then download them..and the POI info for the important ones...
We shall see....
Man I hope to see a review of the TOMTOM, and PocketMap Navigator, (Pharos v6?) new releases soon..or demo versions..
Here's a helpful tip you may not know about when using Mapopolis. I'm using Mapopolis version 4.16. When you load a major road/highway map, it has all the counties showing. If you show less detail, all the counties show up as square icons. By clicking on the square icon, it gives you the name of that county. By entering a route (START/END county), you can then see what counties you will need to load. Hope this has been of some help. :)
Yep...gives me an idea...since I am using the demo, I do not think I have access to the major road/highway map...
Thanks anyway..seems like it makes the full version more useable..
I just load the whole state for Mapopolis. I download the state ZIP, then expand it into a directory, then copy to my SD. In Mapopolis, select the directory, then any county, then click "load contiguous". Presto, the entire state is loaded. RAM use is quine low, thanks to dynamic loading (unless you zoom way out). All of NY works fine. I haven't tried CA, being a "right coast" guy.
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