Going on a bit of a road trip soon and was after some free nav software I can stick on my iPad.

Don’t need too many bells and whistles – just simple turn by turn stuff as it’s only for back up (we’re kinda going to go with the flow on the way to our destination) and no live traffic stuff required

what’s out there?

Any reason you can’t use the Apple maps with mobile data?

does the wifi ipad have GPS now?

it never used to, you need the 3g version to get the GPS chip.

Navfree? Have it on my Android tablet, and it works OK using Openstreetmap data. Not as slick as Garmin, but OK.

Looks like there is an iOS version.

I’ve used Navfree in UK, in Australia & in Canada and it was fine. Very good actually considering it is free, so I splashed out the £1.49 to get rid of the ads.

Jam is right thou’, our non-3G iPad mini purchased in the summer does not have a GPS chip, rendering it useless for navigation. Took me a while to figure that out as it will take a reasonable stab at where you are based on any wifi signals it picks up so driving in town it looks as though it’s working at times. But it’s not.

You’ll need to make sure you have a good car charger and keep it plugged in. GPS eats through the battery pretty quickly.

does the wifi ipad have GPS now?

What jambo says. You can get it to work I think via tethering from your phone. my iPad1 certainly doesn’t have GPS, we use the iPhones as they have a GPS chip.

In Europe we use WAZE (very good, actually its a community so other road user add live updates, working without mobile-data but better with) or Google. You can pre-load maps in google when you have wifi – just load the area you want and scroll around a bit and it cache’s it. ViewRanger is good too for street maps but I don;t use the nav features.

Also what @Sundy says, you must have in-car power.

FWIW a proper European SatNav is much the best, can you borrow one ?

The iPad is a 3G one – dont want to use data while over there so will give NavFree a look.

Also have usb in the car so plugging in shouldn’t be an issue.

I’m not fussed about borrowing a proper SatNav as we’ll probably only use it a couple of times to be honest, we’re mainly happy finding our own way around as we’ve discovered some really nice places by taking a random route which you don’t really get with a satnav.

You can get it to work I think via tethering from your phone. my iPad1 certainly doesn’t have GPS, we use the iPhones as they have a GPS chip.

Have you actually got that to work, or are you seeing coarse location information from the WiFi? As far as I’m aware there’s no way either to share the internal iPhone GPS to other devices, unless that’s changed recently. It certainly used to be an urban myth.

(or do you mean you’re using the phone instead of the tablet?)

@chomp – so browse the maps/areas you want when you have wifi and they should be cached for when you are on the road. The larger battery of the iPad lasts better than the phone as you’d expect.

@cougar – yes I think it shares just the coarse wireless triangulation info, have never got it to work properly but was told it does.

As far as I’m aware there’s no way either to share the internal iPhone GPS to other devices

That’s my understanding too.

No reason it can’t of course – it would be easy to implement sending GPS position to a tethered iPad – they just choose not to so they don’t undermine the 3G/GPS iPad sales.

One of these days I’ll get myself a Mac, sign up as an App Dev and right that wrong 😀