I really don’t want to hire a GPS whilst away on holiday later this year, especially as I’m sure I could buy one for not much more than the hire charge for a fortnight.

So, can anyone please recommend me a GPS that covers North America?

Thank you in advance 😀

Phone app where you download the maps in advance? I used the Route 66 one, bought a month of access.

What unit do you have at the moment? I bought the US maps download from Garmin and run them from the SD card in my unit when I’m there.

If you’ve got some flavour of smartphone, then there are navigation apps that give you US maps. CoPilot is very good and usually cheap. I bought it just in case cos it was £9.99.

for the car that will cover North America

Wow, that’s one big car ya got there mister!

IGMC

What CZ said.

I picked up the US version of CoPilot for buttons when it was on offer a while back, served me well on holiday. Just make sure you run it once here so it can do all its registration gubbins, then after that it doesn’t need a data connection.

I used something called Osmand~ on my android phone (the squiggle is important, for some idiot reason there are multiple versions of the thing) –

It comes from here.
https://f-droid.org/repository/browse/?fdid=net.osmand.plus

It is free, you can pre-download whole states at a time onto your phone. Decent enough maps, and does turn by turn driving directions, all you need is a car charger for your phone.

There is a version on the play store, but it costs money (they are both the same thing with all the features, just this one is a slightly different build that is free).

It isn’t as good as copilot in terms of the clever stuff like lane guidance, but American road layouts are so simple that it isn’t a problem. The maps themselves seemed fine everywhere I was.

I’ve just had a look on the App Store, (other options are available), and CoPilot Premium USA is £6.99. The HD version is £10.99.

Well worth seven quid IMHO; I paid forty times that for my first TomTom.

I was in the same predicament but just bought a cheapo tom-tom 300 on ebay with the maps already downloaded – £50-ish but figured i could sell it after id got back.
Needless to say it proved invaluable getting around and out of the cities and needless to say its still in the drawer !!

Thanks chaps. You’ll have to excuse my ignorance as far as technology is concerned, I’m a total dweeb when it comes to stuff like this.

I have an iphone 4s (God knows why 😳 ) but I thought that if I was to use it as a GPS it would cost me a barsteward fortune. I take it I’m wrong? 😯

Talk me through what I need to do to use it as a GPS then without incurring having to sell the house to pay the phone bill.

Cheers

Neil

Id still go down the GPS route …. 🙄

I wouldnt know where to start sorting out an iphone for forrrin use but can just about programme the tom-tom to get me there .

Another bonus was it spoke english to me and not some mid-western drawl ..

Sounds like the easiest thing for me lasty, knowing me I’ll end up doing something that involves having to fork out a wad of cash.

So, do all tom-tom 300’s come with North American mapping?

No, but depending on when youre going you could borrow mine …. 8)

lasty40AThotmailDOTcom

email on the way lasty 😉

I thought that if I was to use it as a GPS it would cost me a barsteward fortune. I take it I’m wrong?

It doesn’t cost anything to use GPS. Roaming data, however, will be sodding expensive.

GPS can use a thing called “Assisted GPS” which will use a small amount of data. You can switch this off and it’ll work without (should happen automatically when the phone realises it’s roaming), but it’ll take longer to get an initial lock.

GPS applications which download live maps (eg, Google maps) have the capacity to use a tremendous amount of data. You want to avoid these, or download the maps (cache them) before you go. Dedicated satnav apps should come with maps preinstalled; CoPilot and TomTom certainly do this.

Features like Traffic subscriptions will use data. Again though, you don’t have to use this.

https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/copilot-live-premium-usa-offline/id441125930?mt=8