Help Taking your Inc overseas? Let's talk.

ChuckFarley · Aug 20, 2010

I'm traveling to the other side of the planet in a couple months, Argentina, and I'd love to use some of the functions offered by my phone.

I'm not too concerned about making phone calls. If I need that, I plan on purchasing a pre-paid phone.

I'd like to use my phone for: WiFi email/web, and most importantly Google Maps and hopefully Nav.

I know that Google Maps uses data to load the maps, but I've come across Brut Google Maps which will cache google map tiles to your SD card. Sounds very cool, but I haven't tried to use it yet.

[APPMOD][09.08.10] Brut Google Maps 4.4.0.4414-brut16 - xda-developers

Post your experiences using the Inc overseas here. Any tips, tricks or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Happy trails.

inferno1 · Aug 20, 2010

one trick I found,
I set system panel to not kill anything google maps...
then while I had wifi, I opened Gmaps and looked at my entire area at different zoom levels...
all the tiles are then cached and as long as I kept my resources free, the OS wouldnt delete them and I could use Gmaps without data

worked for me in aruba... not the best solution, but it worked...

joehero · Aug 20, 2010

I used it for two weeks after I got it in Europe. Never made a call, but used Fring to make a call to my wife's iPhone over wifi once in the hotel.

When i would wander around Vienna, Brussels, or the German cities I was in, I would load up goodle maps in the morning, get the zoom level i wanted, and just move the map around until I had a perimiter of where I was going. The cached maps worked all day without service or wifi.

The camera worked great, especially when my camera battery died the day of my tour of the Cologne Cathedral. GPS works great as well, so with the cached maps, I always new where I was. Navigation wont work without data since it has to look it up, though you could probably turn on navigation, cache the maps and go to your destination, but you cant look it up when out and about.

I also downloaded a couple translation apps, namely QuickDic for german and that was offline use as well. Everything was great and Ifelt like the only thing missing was making a call 24/7 which is not a bad thing when on vacation.

Just make sure you have wifi in your hotel. I was so glad I didnt take my iPod touch!!!

AND MAKE SURE YOU HAVE THE PHONE IN AIRPLANE MODE THE WHOLE TRIP OUTSIDE YOUR HOTEL!!!!!

ChuckFarley · Aug 20, 2010

inferno1 said:
one trick I found,
I set system panel to not kill anything google maps...
then while I had wifi, I opened Gmaps and looked at my entire area at different zoom levels...
all the tiles are then cached and as long as I kept my resources free, the OS wouldnt delete them and I could use Gmaps without data
worked for me in aruba... not the best solution, but it worked...

I figured that would work, too. Thanks. I'd love to have the data stored locally, but this is a great plan b. I'll need to do some more research on this one. It's kind of a biggy for me, I love having google maps in my pocket.

ChuckFarley · Aug 20, 2010

joehero said:
Navigation wont work without data since it has to look it up, though you could probably turn on navigation, cache the maps and go to your destination, but you cant look it up when out and about.

I'm hoping if I can get the tiles saved to my card, I can still use Nav. I would think that if the map data was there, the Nav logic could be used on the fly. I'll confirm if this is posisble in the coming weeks.

joehero said:
I also downloaded a couple translation apps, namely QuickDic for german and that was offline use as well.

Good idea. I've got google translate added already, but I'm guessing this one uses data too? More fun stuff to research before the trip.

joehero said:
AND MAKE SURE YOU HAVE THE PHONE IN AIRPLANE MODE THE WHOLE TRIP OUTSIDE YOUR HOTEL!!!!!

I plan on leaving my phone in airplane mode once I get on the plane leaving the states. I'll be restricted to WiFi hotspots outside of the house we'll be staying, but it's better than paying ridiculous fees for using data.

mozetti · Aug 20, 2010

ChuckFarley said:
I'm hoping if I can get the tiles saved to my card, I can still use Nav. I would think that if the map data was there, the Nav logic could be used on the fly. I'll confirm if this is posisble in the coming weeks.

I'm not positive, but I think the nav logic is done in the cloud and the maps are cached. Again, I could be wrong but I seem to recall data retrieval when getting directions.

I haven't installed it, but would GoogleEarth for Android make all this futzing about for caching map tiles redundant?

ChuckFarley · Aug 21, 2010

mozetti said:
I'm not positive, but I think the nav logic is done in the cloud and the maps are cached. Again, I could be wrong but I seem to recall data retrieval when getting directions.

I haven't installed it, but would GoogleEarth for Android make all this futzing about for caching map tiles redundant?

I installed the Brut Maps, and it's a little bit of a burden caching the maps at each zoom level, but the maps do work.

There is a Brut Nav, but I'm not quite sure how that works just yet. Having the maps will be great, but having nav would be quite awesome. Might be overkill, but who doesn't love a little overkill? It does come in handy sometimes.

Google Earth works the same way as Google Maps. There are similar programs and methods to cache the tiles, but when using it natively it uses data to load each tile while you're looking at it.

Brut Maps works, but I'm really hoping there's something a little less labor intensive for getting the maps. Either a cached file I can download, or another program that has downloadable maps of South America.

ChuckFarley · Aug 23, 2010

MultiMaps can be found on the market, there's both the free and pro version. This allows you to automatically cache the tiles of a selected area of a chosen location down to multiple zoom levels.

I've just taken a breif look at it, and it has some bugs that I've noticed already, but I'll see how the cache files work and whether or not it could be used with Brut Maps.

There is no option for navigation or direction, as far as I can tell, but it should function properly as a stand alone map.

Help Taking your Inc overseas? Let's talk.

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