Blorg

My needs are simple: I just want to be able to stick a star/pin on locations in the map (current location or other location) and give it a custom name. This is trivial on the PC, iPhone, or any GPS unit. From what I can figure out, it is not possible on Android!

I am travelling around the world and in foreign cities I end up with a load of stars on the map but because they are just addresses, I can't remember what it is that is at each star. Is it a shop? A restaurant? An ATM machine? Who knows! This is a pain in the neck.

Workarounds that I have found:

* Go to Google Bookmarks, find your place among thousands of bookmarks and rename it. Pain in the neck but the best option I've found. At least you can sort the bookmarks by date to get the most recent. If I could just edit the name directly in the Maps app I would be happy.

Note: Using a native bookmark manager like GMarks makes this option slightly less painful (as Google Bookmarks is not optimised at all for a mobile browser.)

* Search for something nearby with the custom tag in brackets. Sometimes this works but it generally doesn't. And I have to find something nearby, I can't just save current location or jab at the map.

* Save to contacts. This doesn't work for me, renaming the contact has no effect on the star title on the map. And it clogs up my contacts with loads of crap I don't want in there.

* Use my PC to create a point in My Maps; it will then be available under layers in Maps on Android. Needs a PC. If I could do this easily on the phone I would be happy.

On an iPod/iPhone this is just tap, bookmark, give it a name. On any GPS I have used it is just "Save location" or "Create waypoint."

Surely there must be some simpler way of doing this? If I can't use Google Maps is there another app that lets me tag places easily? Syncing with My Maps in Google would be nice but I can live with it just on the phone. From what I can figure out people have been crying out for this very basic feature in Maps for years; I really can't understand how it isn't there yet.

My Maps version is 5.11.0.

Any thoughts appreciated.

Thomas_AR

IMHO I think Locus does most of what you are looking for, not 100% sure. Give the free version a try.
https://market.android.com/details?id=menion.android.locus&hl=en

ps333

It really IS astounding that the google people are offering a nice tool free of charge but show themselves to be totally disinterested to even consider addressing a basic issue frustrating many users. For my part I have switched to 'OSMAnd' which offers intelligent solutions for maps and navigation and whose developers are very open to feedback from users.