OT: My personal test of 20 free offline Android gps map routing applications

[Danny D'Amico]

I'm gonna buy the Moto G, for a nephew, for a belated Christmas gift.

The only thing I don't like about it is that it doesn't have an external SD card slot.

Sigh... Google.

[The Real Bev]

Except for the coverage :-( Minimal inside my house (sometimes none), but OK out in front of my neighbor's house. Perfect, right? Fortunately I don't need it at home. Also nothing on my favorite ski slope, although my friend's Verizon works fine. Oh well.

I canceled AT&T LD when they wanted to charge me for NOT using it. Ultimately we canceled their land line and bought an Ooma device. Screw you, AT&T. Been a long time since you were a reputable organization. Decades.

I think I rejected Nexi because of missing external SDcard slot. Probably a bad mistake.

I always thought LG was cheesy. Is this a mistake too?

Not much use for it since all the people I know have free LD and would let me use their phone if I had to make an LD call. Good on vacation, though.

I knew somebody who was friends with Captain Crunch.

I really hate AT&T.

[Danny D'Amico]

Well then, we should all short the Garmin (et. al.) stock!

:)

[krw]

There's that but worse, the Droid Razr doesn't have a replaceable battery. It's only a couple of years, but still.

Indeed.

[krw]

I certainly wouldn't own stock in a company that's lost it's primary market. Only a few have recovered.

[trader4]

My new Android has detailied info recorded on what percentage of power is being used by what. GPS as I recall when I used it on a recent trip of 50 miles or so only used 2%. I was using Maps/routing for just the trip, but have gps turned on all the time.

[trader4]

Are you sure it's just the gps itself and not something else going on when you're using for mapping? You've verified that by turning the GPS off? I just bought a ZTE AWE which is a fairly basic smartphone and I've used the gps and it doesn't get hot or seem to use a lot of power. The phone has an app that records power usage of various functions and after a recent 50 mile or so trip it showed "location services" using just a few percent of the power.

[Nate Nagel]

My first smart phone was a HTC Evo, the one thing I really, really hated about that phone was that the current draw while running Waze or Trapster in vehicle mode (screen always on) was more than the charge current from the car charger. So on a several hour trip I would need to take several spare batteries with me...!

Fortunately, my subsequent phones (Motorola Photon and Photon Q) do not have that issue...

nate

[trader4]

Check out Zact. They are one of the new cheap, flexible companies that ride on the Sprint network. Similar to Ting. It's prepaid, you can dial in the amount of call minutes, data, text that you want for the month. If you go to their website and click on the order now button, it will bring up a cell phone where you can dial in and play with the numbers you want and it shows on the right the monthly cost, which is very reasonable. If you select to much of anything, they give you a $$ credit back, instead of rolling them over. And if you go over, you can add to it during the month.

I got a ZTE AWE smartphone for $100 at BestBuy Mobile (not regular BB), with 4 months of service for free. The free service includes 300 mins voice,

500 txts, 500mb data. To get any kind of smart phone on Verizon would cost me $90+ taxes/fees per month.

After that I figured the way I use the phone, I probably need:

500 min voice 25 txts 100 MB data

That works out to $21 month. I think the calculator on their website shows $13, then there is a $5/line monthly charge and $3 in tax/fees.

You could increase those usages by quite a lot and still it's a really good deal. For example, 700v, 100t, 250d is still just $30 a month. They are similar in price to Ting, but with Ting the blocks of mins come in bigger increments, more like a regular carrier, and the prices jump in bigger increments accordingly. If you actually use all the Ting mins in the Ting bundle, then their price is close to Zact. Other difference is with Zact you need to buy a Zact phone. With Ting you can bring over most phones that will work on Sprint.

I've had it a week now and am very happy with both the phone and service. The call quality isn't as good on it as on Verizon, and Verizon has the best coverage, at least here in the NJ/NYC area. But it's good, I haven't had any dropped calls, etc. A lot would depend on what Sprint coverage is like in any given area.

[Danny D'Amico]

That's criminal. I always faulted the iPhone for that.

[Danny D'Amico]

Heh heh ... I have an Ooma also. It's nice. I even googled for the cheapest 911 zip code so that I could pay only the $3.71/month tax for life instead of the $5 or so that it is for the Silicon Valley.

The only problem with the Ooma is that I get my Internet over the air, and, unfortunately, my "jitter" is greater than 9ms, so, every once in a while, the conversation gets funky.

But, the wife calls Germany all the time, & at 2 cents a minute (for landlines anyway), it's just the same as Skype but she gets to use a real telephone with Ooma (instead of a Skype phone).

[Danny D'Amico]

It's a trade off. I wish Google would just put the SDcard slot in, and then it would be a no brainer.

But, apparently they want to push you toward their cloud services.

Sometimes a card slot isn't as useful as you would think though, simply because some apps (and cellular providers) force certain apps to run from system memory.

But, I found that this free app is pretty good at moving things from system memory to the SDcard: Advanced SD Card Manager

[Danny D'Amico]

These <$200 LG phones are pretty good bang for the buck, but, they won't/can't compete with the $400 phones.

So, from that perspective, these LG phones are "cheesy". especially since most people still probably get their phones under contract, so, they don't physically "see" the $400 price tag, per se, of the smarter phones.

But I buy my phones outright, and use them as gifts, and, I've found you can't get a usable combination of the key things you need at lower than the $200 price tag:

- You want at the very least a 1GHz single CPU

- You want at the very least 1GB of system memory

- You want at the very least 1/2GB of RAM

- You want at least an 800x400 pixel display

- You want at the very least a 4.X Android OS

Of course, for all those things, more is better; but, I've found (through experience) that, if you go below a single one of those minimums, you'll have problems with the phone running apps.

The cheapest you can get a phone that meets *those* minimums is about $179 (plus tax/shipping) so that's what I call a $200 phone.

[Danny D'Amico]

This is a good point.

Luckily, the free OSM maps seem to cover the world, so, the many free OSM routing apps would only need a GPS signal to work anywhere in the world, for free.

[Danny D'Amico]

Hi Steve, I love that Tap Plastics store on Blossom Hill Road, in San Jose. Soon, we'll be using a 3D printing shop, to make our assorted parts! :)

[Danny D'Amico]

You're on to something there ...

Actually, I have a long thread in the mobile phone groups trying to track down *why* my Samsung Galaxy S3 gets so hot when used with GPS in the car.

On some USB car chargers, it gets so hot as to shut down the phone, with a clear message that the battery temperature is too hot. This happened in two different vehicles, so, I narrowed that one down to the charger.

Then I bought the latest charger, and the phone still gets hot with GPS, but nowhere near the blazing shut-down hot that it got before.

So, as you surmised, the heat problem might not be as simple as "just" the GPS being on. The charger may play a role, but, I'm still confounded as to how.

[Danny D'Amico]

That seems insanely low, compared to what my Samsung Galaxy appears to use. I didn't check with the battery app though, so, I should find a power application that tells me how much power each service is using so I can compare with your results.

I do know that the battery dies in 2 hours if I use GPS, so, I simply *assumed* it was the GPS that was killing it.

Bear in mind, you *might* be using cellular triangulation for your location services - in which case it wouldn't be using the GPS...

[Danny D'Amico]

Hi Nate, I see you've replaced that phone, but, that's exactly why I recommend the dual-port 3.1 Amp USB car chargers.

One port is 2.1 Amps (strange number is due to the iPad requirement); and the other port is 1 Amp.

In my experience, most smartphones nowadays will outstrip their charger once you get lower than about 850mA, and, it's very important to note that the USB standard is only 500mA.

So, if your car charger doesn't actually *say* it's 1Amp, it's probably only about 500mA, which is far too low (IMHO) for a smart phone.

So I don't doubt your results.

Bear in mind, in my experience looking at every USB car charger I could find in stores (mostly Frys), if they don't say what their current is, then they're 500mA. If they say the amperage, but don't say how much is in each slot, then you can really only get that amperage out of only one slot at a time.

And, if they say just the watts (which is the amperage times the

5 volts), then usually they're very low because wattage sounds bigger than amperage.

In the end, since they're all 5 volts, the *amperage* you can get out of *each slot* (at the same time!) is what you want to aim for.

The funny thing is that it doesn't cost more to get a better charger, other than the time to make the selection based on the amperage.

[krw]

They're trading off the replaceable battery for the sleek case. It's not a terrible tradeoff since the things generally last only two years. It's fairly rare for a LiIon battery to fail in that two years. They will lose some capacity but the Razr MAXX (most likely my next phone) that covered with *huge* capacity.

[The Real Bev]

The BLU Dash 4.5, my brand of poison, for $139 plus whatever Engadget charges for tax+shipping has:

1.2GHz quad-core chip from MediaTek

4GB of storage, but a lot of that is already used

512MB of RAM

854 x 480

4.2

Could be worse...