During last two weeks I did two 250km trips. First Poznań -> Szczecin, then return. Road into both directions is good and it is impossible to get lost but I took my N810 with me.
Before trip I started Maemo Mapper to generate route and fetch all needed maps (from Google Maps street view). This part was fast. I checked generated route does it have sense and stored on card as there is no offline route generation — you can do it only online by querying author’s website which send query to Google Maps, converts and returns XML.
Ok, time to go — I packed car with all our luggage and during that left N810 in car to get “gps fix” as internal GPS needs time for this operation. During trip we looked from time to time just to check are we on track. Few times tablet just rebooted which resulted in no GPS fix until next longer stop :( But it does not need to reboot to lose position — look at our return trip track (clean road, no tunnels etc):
I know that there are people who use Nokia tablets for car navigation. But how does it compare to TomTom Navigator which I had occasion to use one day…
Let’s see.
| Function | TomTom | Maemo Mapper | Wayfinder |
|---|---|---|---|
| price | 99 EUR for PDA edition1 | free (GPL) | 9 EUR (1 month) |
| 69 EUR (year) | |||
| 70 EUR (3 years) | |||
| 1 week free trial2 | |||
| offline routing | + | - | require licence |
| detour planning | + | - | - |
| finger friendly keyboard | + | - | - |
| address lists with prediction | + | no such lists | + |
So it looks like I will not buy HH-12 car holder to use N810 for car navigation but rather TomTom device or some Windows CE/Mobile navigator with TomTom software to have something usable.