Google maps

[jkoppee]

Ok so here's a review for all of you using Goolge maps. I've had the program for a while and never really used it for anything other than showing off the sattelite view. I went on a snowboarding trip to Vermont over the weekend so I used it to navigate. All in all it's a greta application considering it is free but I almost wanted to kill it on the way home.

The program is nice and pretty easy to use. The menus for inputting things such as find and get directions are very annoying. When you bring up the menu for directions there is a FROM and TO field and like every other fill in you would assume you hit the center D pad to populate but this is not the case. You need to go to options and then select something such as previous searches or Use Gps. Very frustrating to get used to.

So here's the jist of it. Going to Vermont was about a 5 hour drive and it trakced great and it didn't seem to require much data information if you're zoomed out enough. It only loads new map information if your location goes outside the window you are viewing so the closer in you zoom the more information it downloads. I would not suggest using unless you have an unlimited data package from your provider. The location I was navigating too was about 5 miles farther from where it said it was so luckily I had been there before.

Ok so now the bad part of it. On the way home I was using it to navigate out of Vermont which is not known for it's great cellular coverage as it's quite rural and mountainous. For about the first hour the cell coverage read full bars but I don't think there's is much in the way of data coverage and Google Maps seems to hate this. It says a data connection is required but the problem arose when it seemed to find minimal coverage. The icon appeared and said it had connection but Google Maps froze every time I opened it and it either restarted my phone or locked up the phone to where I had to remove the battery. It would work enough to where I could quickly get to the next set of directions but would then freeze and it did this about 15-20 times in a row. This really bothered me greatly.

So the short of it is if you're planning on traveling to a location with spotty coverage (especially data coverage) then DO NOT try to rely on Google Maps for navigation.