Car navigation with N810

Friday, May 16th, 2008 by Marcin Juszkiewicz

During last two weeks I did two 250km trips. First Poznań -> Szczecin, then return. Road into both directions is good and it is impossible to get lost but I took my N810 with me.

Before trip I started Maemo Mapper to generate route and fetch all needed maps (from Google Maps street view). This part was fast. I checked generated route does it have sense and stored on card as there is no offline route generation — you can do it only online by querying author’s website which send query to Google Maps, converts and returns XML.

Ok, time to go — I packed car with all our luggage and during that left N810 in car to get “gps fix” as internal GPS needs time for this operation. During trip we looked from time to time just to check are we on track. Few times tablet just rebooted which resulted in no GPS fix until next longer stop :( But it does not need to reboot to lose position — look at our return trip track (clean road, no tunnels etc):

I know that there are people who use Nokia tablets for car navigation. But how does it compare to TomTom Navigator which I had occasion to use one day…

Let’s see.

Function TomTom Maemo Mapper Wayfinder
price 99 EUR for PDA edition1 free (GPL) 9 EUR (1 month)
69 EUR (year)
70 EUR (3 years)
1 week free trial2
offline routing + - require licence
detour planning + - -
finger friendly keyboard + - -
address lists with prediction + no such lists +

So it looks like I will not buy HH-12 car holder to use N810 for car navigation but rather TomTom device or some Windows CE/Mobile navigator with TomTom software to have something usable.

  1. often comes pre-installed on Windows Mobile devices ↩

  2. after trial period each run shows requester with “enter license key or purchase” and settings window (on right side of screen) is not available ↩



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Online map services and routing

Tuesday, May 22nd, 2007 by Marcin Juszkiewicz

During Friday I had a trip to my family city (Olecko, Poland) for my sister wedding. It was by car (not mine) and we had to visit brother to take him with us. As I never was in Toruń before I had to use some online services to see how to get to the place where he works.

Google Maps
Interface easy to use, checking directions can be done with few clicks, adding new points to trip is intuitive. But route is not optimal — force to use highways (Poland nearly does not have such ones) so I needed to add few extra points to get proper directions. Printing is unusable — most of space taken by driving instructions and maps in print are small.
Targeo
Only Poland covered. Map is from AutoMapa navigation application. Interface also easy to use but lack scrollwhell support and need some time to understand buttons. Allow to create route with few points and do it well. As a bonus it show list of road repairs. Printing does not work.
Zumi
Also only Poland covered. Flash interface :( Only routing from point to point. Printing use flash too.

Finally I checked route in Google Maps and Targeo. Needed part (Toruń, where we had to take my brother) was printed from GM screenshot.



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