Iphone GPS apps

>How do you set up SIM pin lock/unlock on iPhone 4 that has a locked SIM from AT&?

You can go to your online account, click on "My Device." There will be a link for the PUK lock code. Then you can change it to whatever you want.

If you get the code wrong three times the phone locks the SIM. Ten times and it smokes it!

Thanks Sam.

[AmyL july 1 2011: this post is superceded by more thorough information further down in the thread, so don’t bother reading this post. I’m keeping info up to date our article about using iPhone as Backpacking GPS/Mapping device. .]

I’ve been investigating this for a couple weeks now. I had planned to write a full report/evaluation when done, but I think I’ll join the party and do an interim brain dump.

I’m preparing for a six week hike in Turkey (Lycian Way + St Paul Path + Kackar Mountains). I haven’t used a GPS receiver in the past. The trail guide books come with schematic maps with course contour lines and GPX files, but not the quality topo maps I’m used to using, so it seemed to be a good time to evaluate electronic gadgets to augment the paper map.

I bought a Garmin Oregon to evaluate. And I already have an iTouch. After playing with the apps on the iTouch I returned the Garmin unused — the iTouch/Phone is a better solution for my needs. Thanks to the people who posted on this forum about battery life tips/experience. I will probably upgrade to an iPhone (iTouch can store and display the maps I need, but has no GPS receiver); but even if I decide to stick with the iTouch, the ability to carry detailed topo and satellite images for a huge area is very appealing.

Open Street Map (aka OSM) is an Open Source project to provide high quality detailed map data to the world. Sort of like wikipedia for map info. The Open Street Map site has a list of iPhone apps that make use of OSM data. There are so many apps it would take me weeks to evaluate them all. The beauty of OSM is that the map content is continually improving, just like wikipedia, as more people contribute info. I was floored that the Lycian Way is plotted as a labelled trail in OSM.
Link to OpenStreetMap list of iPhone Apps

So far I’ve played with three different apps. Each of these three has different advantages, and I don’t see any reason to pick only one. Heck, you can get all three of them for under $20, and the maps are FREE, compared to $300+ for a Garmin device.

Topo Maps http://topomapsapp.com/
Great app for offline use of 7.5 minute USGS quads or comparable Canadian topos. That’s all it does, but it does it really well. It only has a few features, but they are the right features and it’s super simple to use. There’s no learning curve here, just get the app and start using/enjoying it. Worth the $8 just to be able to carry the “what can I see from here” feature in the field and to be able to search, offline, for every place name that appears on USGS maps :)

Galileo Offline Maps http://galileo-app.com/
[AmyL july 1 2011: as of 06/25/2011 MobAC no longer provides satellite images, so this app has no real value anymore.]
This has a steeper learning curve, by iPhone app standards, but the added effort is well worth it IF you want to mix satellite and topo layers into one map. First, you create custom maps on your desktop using Open Source software called Mobile Atlas Creator, aka MobAC (http://mobac.dnsalias.org/). Important to note that the Galileo website doesn’t mention that you need to install the SqliteJDBC library, info on that is at the mobac website.
Then, you copy the map you created to your iTouch/Phone using iTunes.
Mobac has about 25 different source maps, including all the google types and Open Street Map types and obscure things like specialized maps of Slovakia, Russia, New Zealand, etc. You can specify different map types for different zoom levels, which is awesome. I’ve been creating maps using street map types for zoom level 0-12, OpenStreetMap Cyclemap type for zoom 13-15, and satellite for zoom 16.
Downsides: No GPX file import, so I can’t load my personal track data. No ability to download new maps once I leave home, since it is dependent on copying files from my desktop machine via iTunes. No scale on the displayed map (who would ever build a map application and not show a scale, unbelievable). The only way to delete a map that’s been installed is using iTunes; in my case I have plenty of room on my iTouch, but somebody who is short on space and traveling for a couple months might find this a critical shortcoming.
Summary: If somebody else offers an iPhone app that uses MobAC generated maps, then Galileo won’t be worth it due to its shortcomings. But as far as I can tell it is the only way to view a MobAC custom map using iPhone/Touch. (There are more MobAC solutions for Android.)

Gaia GPS http://www.gaiagps.com/
I haven’t played with this extensively yet. From what I’ve read and seen so far, it looks like it will be great. The available maps include MyTopo (usgs), OpenStreetMap, and Cloudmade (which is OSM inside). The Cloudmade Topo is the same base information as the OSM Cyclemap — i.e. high quality topo map worldwide (or at least as much of the world that I’ve explored so far.) Maps can be saved for offline use. GPX files can be imported and exported.
Advantages: download maps for offline use with WIFI connection, so you can update your map collection while traveling. Cloudmade Topo covers the world (I think). Clean interface.
Disadvantages: I haven’t found a PDF format users manual, so I think you have to have an internet connection to read their web pages if you need help [note to developer — please add this]. Can’t mix map types in zoom layers as in mobac. Satellite type maps not available.

I have already installed three more apps that I haven’t tried yet, and there are many more. It’s clear to me that there are fantastic solutions out there. The problem is that there are so many choices and it takes so much time to wade through all of it. At this point I believe I could stop studying and use a combo of Gaia GPS (for topo maps with my GPX track preloaded) and Galileo (for satellite images) for my trip to Turkey. And I will always carry and use the Topo Maps while in the US, since I’ve grown up with 7.5 minute quads and will always love them, and the “what can I see from here” feature is too good to pass up.

Thanks to everybody who already posted on this thread — the info about removing the SIM card on the iPhone is golden, and something that non-backpackers wouldn’t have flagged.

Amy

This will be a review of the strengths and weaknesses of the following popular trail navigation apps: Gaia GPS (the paid version of Offline Topo Maps), AccuTerra Unlimited (definitely get the unlimited version, otherwise it's pay as you go), Maplets, MotionX GPS, and EveryTrail Pro. I use these apps on an iPhone 4 running iOS 5 Beta 2. All but AccuTerra and MotionX are available for Android as well.

Note: All responses insinuating I, or anybody else, is "incorrectly" enjoying the outdoors because I bring a device that includes office work in addition to its myriad outdoorsy "multi-use" capabilities (GPS, musical instrument, music player, notepad, books/games/movies, flashlight, camera, etc.) can promptly snuff it. HYOH.

:Maps:

The standards in open-source topographical maps are MyTopo and Cloudmade. Gaia, EveryTrail, MotionX and many other popular smartphone GPS apps use these maps.

MyTopo maps look very much like USGS maps. They clearly weren't made with digital devices in mind, are limited in their maximum zoom levels, and trails and streams are unlabled and often difficult to see at all in the cluttered and pixelated contour lines, and the maps give little information regarding vegetation, tree line, etc.

Cloudmade maps, on the other hand, are visually quite appealing: clearly readable at all zoom levels, with trails and geographical features clearly visible amongst the contour lines (One version, CloudMade Shaded, simply removes the contour lines), and decent indications of the sort of environment one can expect to find themselves in at a given point. Sadly, though trail are clearly visible, they're hardly ever labeled, and in areas with many intersections this could be a huge problem.

Gaia offers the best selection: offering 3 flavors of CloudMade maps in addition to MyTopo and OpenStreet maps. More importantly (and what separates Gaia from its free version) is that Gaia has a huge list of POIs built in, marking everything from trail heads to summits to popular sites, to parks, etc. These POIs go a long way to overcoming the limitations of the open-source maps, but not all the way since though trailheads are marked, and sometimes even color coded, the trails are not so there's still the intersection problem.

EveryTrail, for its part, offers a large cache of ready-made (and largely free) trip guides including trail lines, descriptions, photos, landmarks to spot on the way, side-routes, etc. for thousands and thousands of popular trails and dayhikes. These can be downloaded directly from the phone or sent to the phone with one click at everytrail.com for offline use. EveryTrail also allows users to add and share their own guides and trips that they make within the app (by far the most useful social experience). Unfortunately, many of the guides are for day hike and shorter distances. I haven't seen anything for the Tahoe Rim or John Muir Trails, much less something like the PCT, but there are still a number of great multi-day trips listed.

Maplets takes a different approach, functioning as a search and caching tool for the sort of maps one might find at ranger stations and tourist destinations. The maps vary in quality but there is an enormous range available, and for popular destinations like national parks the trail labeling, POIs, etc. of these maps really trumps all other options. It doesn't cover everything, but for popular parks and trails Maplets is superb and non-redundant.

Finally, the cream of the crop in digital backcountry maps is unquestionably AccuTerra. Their maps are proprietary and exclusive to their app. The accuterra maps have all trails/creeks/roads clearly coded and labeled, extremely high resolution geographic textures, a moderate range of POIs, etc. They're absolutely gorgeous. AccuTerra maps one shortcoming is that they don't show environmental features like treelines, vegetation, etc. AccuTerra also has premium maps including POIs and other features for popular destinations like parks, rec areas, forests, wildernesses, etc.

:Caching:

Where AccuTerra stumbles is in the ease of caching offline maps. While downloading maps for popular parks is an easy search and click, downloading area maps uses a clumsy multi-layered grid system. Beyond a small state size level of magnification (even with a present data connection) you'll see a pattern of "maps are available use grid to download" at which point you have to manually turn on a "download grid", select squares (because people and trails travel in squares?), and then wait for that level to download. This must be done manually for each new level of magnification, which allows you to download only the map areas you need, saving space, but it would be really nice if (within limits) there was a button that allowed you to download every resolution within a particular grid.

This is, in fact, what Gaia does with its caching system. A type of map is selected (cloudmade, topo, street, etc.), a square is drawn on the map at whatever zoom level you like (maps suited to your current zoom level are automatically loaded on the fly and the last 800 grids you've looked at are cached so if you zoom in all the way and follow your intended route, you should theoretically have the whole thing cached automatically), then a maximum zoom level is chosen to be downloaded for that area (you're limited within reason, so don't go trying to download a continent at extremely high resolutions), then you click download and Gaia does it's thing, saving the map in a library for your later perusal until you delete it. Gaia's main caching stumble is that it's area selection still limited to squares, which is a terribly inefficient and unnatural way to store maps, especially when the maps are such large file sizes as AccuTerra's are (all that detail has a price).

Of all the apps tested, only MotionX does better. MotionX can download maps within a circle around a central point, and it can download maps within a set distance from a straight line drawn point to point. Unfortunately, the desired resolution to be downloaded can't be set manually as it can in Gaia, but since you can select an area along a trail with reasonable efficiency, you'd probably want the highest resolution for nearly all of it anyway.

Maplets doesn't really have a caching system. You find a map for a park or other destination, download the whole thing, and that's about it. It's great if you can find the right map, not so great if you can't.

:Reliability:

All of these apps are fairly reliable. As mentioned, I'm currently running iOS 5 beta 2, and that may account for some instability. Unfortunately, AccuTerra is currently the buggiest among them.

Cloudmade maps load quite slowly on Gaia for some reason, but there's no problem downloading them. Otherwise it's the most reliable of the bunch, with the cleanest interface and layouts for both iPad and iPhone.

AccuTerra, upon launch, gives notice that the company is getting new ownership, and that you must register your app so you can get the new app once it's released, which you'll need to do since the current app will no longer be supported. This is a little worrisome, but it sounds like it'll turn into a win for users.

AccuTerra "search" currently returns an error for me, but maps can still be downloaded through the grid system and the "nearby" and "featured" map search functions still work quite well.

:Killer Features:

Everytrail-Social
The Ability to create, share, search, and download such rich trip reports is absolutely a killer feature. All of these apps offer "GPS tracking", but none of them justify its use like EveryTrail. It'd be great if some BPLers would work to add some longer distance and multi-day standards to the EveryTrail community. I love reading about trip reports before planning my own, but even the best, most media-rich trip reports I've seen on BPL (Tony Wong and company, looking at you, great job with your TRT report) lack the geographical coherence of the average EveryTrail guide.

Gaia-POIs
Makes it really easy to find trails to research further. The POIs often even link to outside sources containing the necessary research. It also has the best interface and a solid caching system. A real contender if it can find a way to make trails clearer.

Maplets-Variety in maps
Wish you had another map for an area? You can often find them here. This app is really complementary to a more comprehensive mapping solution using open-source maps, but it's a great one.

AccuTerra-MAPS!
They really are just beautiful. The best maps out there. They're why AccuTerra is my go to app.

MotionX-Caching!
The most efficient and sensible system of downloading the map data you need for your trip, and nothing more.

:Still Waiting For:

The absolute best system of caching, I believe, would combine Gaias resolution setting with a system to manually finger draw around an area to be downloaded. that way non linear trails (aren't they all?) and areas of interest could be efficiently selected with a minimum number of steps. Unfortunately, this doesn't exist.

Path distance and sum elevation change measurement. Right now you can find out how far you are from a waypoint, but not how far you have to walk along a path to get there or how much elevation changes in that time. It'd be great to get that distance and even see an elevation profile of what's coming up like you'll often see before climbing stages in the Tour de France (WHICH STARTS TOMORROW! WOOT!). (This functionality and even server side off-trail route planning actually exists to exciting extent in a new app called, simply enough, "Outdoor Navigation". I've downloaded but don't have enough experience to offer a full review. Maybe I'll add one in a few hundred miles)

Finally, and most of all, the market is still waiting for "One to Rule Them All". There's no clear winner in the category. I use AccuTerra 90% of the time, especially once the maps are cached and I'm on the trail, but it was the first app of this sort I bought and clearly I've been searching hard for a viable replacement. This, after all, is why I own all these apps, because as redundant as they seem to be in many ways, they're complementary. Fortunately, altogether they cost barely $20, a fraction of any of the GPS devices one might otherwise consider, and all of them are better than the dedicated backcountry GPS devices I've seen.

:General Tips:

1)Take out your SIM card! This allows the GPS antenna to function continuously without draining the battery searching for a cell network that doesn't reach where we go. When I first started using these apps I would turn airplane mode on and off every time I wanted to check the GPS, and that was a multi-step pain in the neck. Turning off 3G helps, but the phone will still crank up the cell power to full trying to find the old EDGE network.

2)Make sure your GPS antenna switches off when you lock your phone! The "location services" icon in the top right should not be visible in the Lock Screen. Leaving GPS tracking on will drain a full battery dry in just a few hours.

1) Thanks for the nice words. It's really this kind of thing more than anything that makes developing the app so fulfilling… that and not getting lost in the woods.

2) Regarding the slow OpenCycle maps, we are now providing an alternate free source for this. We just hacked it into the Map Store last night, so we could roll it out quickly, and we will replace the existing default OpenCycle source with this server in the next release.

3) If you want to use the faster source:
* Go to Settings->Map Store
* add the "New CloudMade Cycle" source (it's free)
* restart the app
* there should now be a sixth source under Map Sources, which is just a faster OpenCycleMap source

4) We definitely have plans to make some of the improvements you describe, such as improving map caching functions. The next thing we have coming is something we are very excited about. GaiaCloud will let you keep all of your waypoints and tracks backed up and syncable across multiple devices.

5) Also, if any BPL member wants a free copy of Gaia GPS or Offline Topo Maps, send me an email at andrew@gaiagps.com. I must sheepishly admit that we just raised the prices of both Offline Topo Maps and Gaia GPS. Since the BPL forum is always so nice, anyone can feel free to email me for a promo code.

6) Free Android too if you want it.

Good support for a software product is critical, and it's currently the major shortcoming of AccuTerra.

Glad to hear about route syncing. So critical for apps compatible with both iPhone and iPad, and something so few apps do.

If you enabled routes to be drawn in advance–shared would be even better, but I realize that probably requires a TON of development–that might well overcome the lack of trail labeling in the OpenCycle maps. Maybe POIs for trailheads could include route overlays in their info for particularly popular ones like TRT or JMT?

I'll be sure to update my review as significant new features become available.

@ Andrew, Thanks for the code. The app looks pretty easy to learn and nice detail,cant wait to try this out next weekend on a hike around Three Finger Jack.
Thanks again Duane

Thanks AttaboyBrad for a great write up! I’ve been working on my own comprehensive write-up, so I’ll just add it to this thread since it complements AttaboyBrad’s info.

Earlier this year I posted questions and comments about iPhone gps/mapping apps as I was preparing to use the iPhone for a six week hike in Turkey.
(Trip Reports Part 1 and Part 2).
Using the iPhone in Turkey was a great success, and since my return I’ve worked on documenting what I learned. My opinions are mostly consistent with AttaboyBrad, with a few slight differences in what we value in apps. This second comprehensive review is a complement to, not a replacement for, AttaboyBrad’s post earlier in this thread.

Instructions on how to use iPhone as GPS/Mapping device.

Anyone figure out if there is a way to turn off the cellular connection on a CDMA iPhone w/o killing the GPS receiver?

Not sure about the iPhone, but on a Droid (Verizon) as long as you get the GPS fix, you can put the phone into Airplane mode and it will keep GPS going.

My Motorolla Droid turns off the GPS under airplane mode, but I have been told other devices keep the GPS on.

The iPhone/iPad shut down the GPS under airplane mode too.

@Tim – no, there is not a way to turn off the cellular connection on a Verizon iPhone w/o killing the GPS receiver. In order to conserve battery and still use the iPhone’s gps, you’d need to toggle the Airplane Mode setting every time you want a gps read. The ATT iPhone is clearly better for backpacking because you can easily disable the phone and thereby save battery.

I’m keeping info up to date our article about using iPhone as Backpacking GPS/Mapping device. . I just updated that page with info about Verizon iPhone 4, and I’ll keep updating it as I learn new things.