Finally had a chance to use Backcountry Navigator this weekend so here's a quick review.
The software itself is probably 7.5/10 … the problem is that my Samsung Galaxy SIII combination brought it down to 6/10.
That said.. having NO GPS is a 0/10 so this is way better – especially if you're already carrying the Android device.
The GPS antenna just isn't strong enough and it had problems finding its location sometimes and I just gave up about 30% of the time.
You have to have a large SD card to run it… I bought a 64G SD card for like $50 and cached the tile data.
It basically lets you select a region on the map and then it will prefetch all the tiles before you go out.
The entire Yosemite region took about 30 minutes to download.
It IS really handy having a second map. Especially where you can zoom out to the ENTIRE Yosemite region and then zoom in at high resolution at your current location.
Definitely better than a map!
The other problem is battery life. My Android phone power usage is reasonable but my iPhone was MUCH better.
The upside is that it has a removable battery so I packed in two batteries.
My iPhone would last about 7 days in the woods just taking videos and pics. With about the same usage the SIII could only get about 2-3 days… I would say that the iPhone is about 3x better in battery usage (at least with my 4S).
This also means that it's somewhat difficult to use it as a Kindle reader because you're going to burn battery FAST.
This is with all the features like Wifi, Bluetooth, GPS, Cellular, etc disabled.
If I could get a device with 2x better battery usage and a better GPS antenna it would be a BIG win.
