Experience with upgrading from Citymaps to Navigator

MarkH

I finally made the move to upgrade from Citymaps to Navigator - just want to share my experience in case anybody else is deciding if it's worth it.

You can get Citymaps Europe for £40 which covers every major city and town in most of Western Europe apart from Ireland. Navigator costs around £200 - £100 for one country map and another £100 for the maps of Europe. I don't drive so Citymaps did the job but I has getting frustrated with the 20 "pushpin" limit - I couldn't get custom POIs working, TomTom couldn't help me either - I came to the conclusion it was impossible, though might work on other platforms like EPOC. Custom POI's can be useful at home for things like wifi hotspots and abroad for all the useful POIs you get in the Lonely Planet guide books.

Advantages:

- Has house numbering - my 2002 citymaps doesn't have this (try finding an address on Oxford St. without this)
- Has more built-in POIs - ATM machines being the most useful
- Has 5 digit postcodes after the street name in the drop-down list when you are searching for an address - Citymaps had something like "City of London..." which made it impossible to pick the right street if there was multiple streets with the same name.
- With "ukpostcode" you can get 7 digit postcode lookup - very useful
- Can find a place from an address in your contacts - doesn't work very well, the address has to be in a particular format.
- 3D view when GPS is turned on - doesn't work very well while walking - orientation doesn't get updated. Can be 2D too like in Citymaps.
- Covers small towns for example Zarautz in Spain (not covered in Citymaps)
- Citymaps is disconntinued by TomTom where's Navigator is actively being developed
- Has voice prompts but only work for non-walking route planning
- Itinerary - stopping at multiple spots along a journey - though not optimised like CoPilot
- Has a whole load of options to customise Navigator
- Provides an estimated time of arrival in route planning as well as how long it will take like in Citymaps.

Neutral:

- Still has "walk" as an option in route planning. I don't think Copilot has this - car and RV as far as I know - correct me if I'm wrong.

Disadvantages:

- You can't just stick the map of London on your PDA's RAM (well you might if you have a lot spare) - the smallest is London and the rest of the south-east of England down to the coast which is 16MB, which means you have to stick it on an SD card
- Because you have to use a SD card it's slower than say Citymaps with a 3.5MB map in RAM.
- 5 times more expensive if you want european maps.
- You have to enter a city when searching for an address, since the maps cover lot larger areas.

	PocketGPS
	Web