As hurricane activity heats up, Android Police has a nice roundup/review of Android apps for monitoring and tracking hurricanes, including maps. Top choices are Hurricane Hub and Hurricane Hound, both free.
Archive for August, 2010
Application Name: Bing for Android
Description: Interface for Microsoft Bing services, including Bing Maps.
Publisher’s website: Bing Community post
Cost: Free; currently only available for Verizon customers (coming “soon” for others)
Version/date reviewed: v.1.01 / 8-30-10
Phone/OS: Droid X / Android 2.2
Android market link (mobile apps)
Android Market (browser)
A number of apps have had unofficial Bing map viewing capabilities, but Microsoft has just released their first official Bing application, including Bing Maps support. Unfortunately, the initial release is only for Verizon phones, which pretty much means that if your phone doesn’t say “Droid”, you’re out of luck. But they do say it will be coming to other carriers “soon”, whatever that means. It’s now available for all phones from all carriers.
This is the full Bing experience, including text/image search; but since this is a geo-referenced site, I’ll only look at the geography-related features.
Figure 1: Start up the app, and get the Bing image of the day on your starting screen (looks like China here). Search box at top, with voice entry capabilities; additional options down at the bottom. Tapping on that little grid box minimizes the additional options off the screen. Going to Maps …
Figure 2: …Standard street map view. If you’ve given the app permission to access the GPS, the blue dot is your current location, and the “filled” blue dot at lower left indicates that the map will keep you at the center of the map if you move.Standard two-finger pinch and zoom on supported touch screens, or use the zoom controls at lower right. Touch and drag to move to a different area, or enter a geographic search term at top. When you move the map area, the “filled” blue dot will become unfilled to show your current position is no longer at the center; at any time, you can tap that control and re-center the view around your current position.
You can change to different views (aerial and hybrid) with the Menu => Map Type control; I wish there were a layers button on the map itself to make this easier. You can also get rid of the search bar at top with Menu => More => Full screen.
For a long time, Bing only had black-and-white government aerial imagery for my area, which paled in comparison to Google’s color imagery. But they recently added aerial imagery for my neighborhood, and I must say it’s sensational, much better than Google’s for the same view. Below (Figure 3) are Bing (left) and Google (right) aerial views for the same spot at maximum zoom for each map app, and Bing just kicks Google’s ass in terms of quality and resolution. Two pics were taken at different times of the year, so that’s why the pond looks different:
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Bing Maps (aerial view, maximum zoom) |
Google Maps (satellite view, maximum zoom) |
Positional accuracy was much better than Google Maps, too; Bing Maps imagery appeared to be pretty much dead-on, while Google Maps was off about 10-20 meter. I’ll be testing GPS accuracy on my Android unit for future posts, but based on what I saw today using accurate Bing Maps imagery, it’s pretty damn good. One thing Google Maps on Android has that Bing Maps currently hasn’t is the ability to view your own points/lines/polygons (more on this soon).
Figure 4: Under the “Local” option are listings for local business and attractions. It’s nice to have these integrated in the main app, unlike Google Maps, which pushes you to the separate Places app (I’ll be covering Google Maps in depth in a few weeks). My unofficial test shows Bing to be more up-to-date than Google; Google still lists a local pizza place that closed 5 years ago, while Bing doesn’t have it. Google does a much better job pulling up restaurant reviews, though.
Figure 5: Directions work reasonably well; starts by default from your current location, initially shows the full path to your destination, then zooms in as you move through the directions step by step with the arrow keys at top. But this isn’t automatic navigation; you have to press the arrow keys as you reach the end of various steps on your trip. Google Maps Navigation is far better, with automatic spoken turn-by-turn directions, and the classic 3D view used by standard car GPS units. No contest here – Google kicks Bing’s ass in return.
Other Issues:
Bing seems to use its own voice-to-text entry service in the app, and it’s not very good – slower than Google’s native interface, and recognition can be hit-and-miss. There was one time when the app wouldn’t respond in the Directions mode, but exiting back to the main menu and then going back to Maps and Directions fixed that problem. And, of course, it has the classic problem where it only works if you have a data connection, either cellular or WiFi, but it’s hardly alone in that. For a first release product, I found it remarkably polished, bug-free, and easy to use.
Final thoughts:
It’s not a replacement for Google Maps by any stretch, but the Bing app is an excellent complement, particularly for its first-rate aerial imagery and integrated local search. And if you like Bing search (I think it’s OK, but prefer Google), it’s nice to have a specialized app for that rather than struggling with the browser’s shrunken view. Highly recommended for Verizon users who can get it right away; for those on other carriers, hopefully you won’t have to wait too long 
.
Smartphones are notorious for mediocre battery life; some have trouble making it through a single day without needing to be charged, and even good ones need to get plugged into the charger overnight to bring them back to life for the next day. If you read a guide on extending battery life, like this one from Verizon, one of their main recommendations is disabling GPS on your unit. I don’t like this, since I want to use my Android phone as a geography tool, and for the best accuracy you need to have GPS enabled and running when you need it. What’s more, I wasn’t really sure this was the case – handheld GPS units can get up to 20-25 hours of use from a single set of batteries, and I wasn’t convinced that the battery drain on a cellphone could be that much worse.
So I thought I’d run a few tests on my Droid X phone to see how quickly each of these parameters by themselves drains the stock 1550 mAh / 3.7V battery:
- Baseline (everything turned off, but phone still powered on)
- GPS
- Screen
- Bluetooth
- WiFi 3G
Initial conditions:
- Battery fully-charged (charge indicator showed “Full” for at least an hour)
- All non-essential programs shut off using a task killer program
- Battery state monitored using the Battery Graph app (which exports battery percent vs. time data in CSV format)
- GPS kept on using Tracker Booster software; this software uses < 0.1% CPU load, so it shouldn’t consume that much battery life by itself
Initial runs were done overnight for at least 10 hours, but I quickly found out that battery drain time was linear, i.e. it took about the same time to drop from 90% to 80% battery as it did for 30% to 20%. So subsequent runs were cut short.
| Parameter | Time for battery charge to drop 10% (min.) | Total battery life (hrs) | Comments |
| Baseline (all services turned off, phone still on) | - | - | After 12 hours, battery still read 100% |
| GPS only | 70 | 12 | |
| Screen only | 100 | 16.7 | 50% brightness |
| Bluetooth only | - | - | Active connection with microphone/headpiece; battery still at 100% after 12 hours |
| WiFi/3G only | 270 | 45 | No talk or network activities |
| GPS and screen | 42 | 7 | No talk or network activities |
A real disappointment for me; under normal use conditions, having the GPS up and running continuously seems to be the biggest power hog on my Droid X, and that may well be true for other phones as well. Keep the screen on, a necessity if you want to view maps or save data, and you’ll be lucky to get 7 hours since you’ll also have the map/data application drawing power as well. So if I want to use my Android unit out in the field for prolonged periods of time, I’m going to have to figure out ways to extend the battery life somehow, or use alternate sources of power. Some suggestions on how to do that tomorrow.
A few last points:
- If your GPS wasn’t going to be acquiring positions anyway, disabling GPS won’t make your battery last any longer than it would have anyway. It’s only if it keeps GPS signal/position acquisition from turning on that you’ll save on battery life, but you’ll lose all the location-dependent services (maps, navigation, geotagging, position tracking, etc.)
- Rather annoyingly on my Droid X, if you disable GPS with a widget button, you also disable using wireless networks for fast but rough position determinations, and also turn off Assisted GPS (where cell tower stations provide info that improves GPS performance). If you use the widget to turn GPS back on, Assisted GPS and wireless network position acquisition do not get turned back on again; you have to go to Settings => Location & Security to turn those back on again. Your phone may be different – check and see.
- The Bluetooth results are encouraging; I’ll be testing a few apps in the future that let you use a Bluetooth GPS receiver with an Android phone, and this might be a good way to extend battery life substantially.
If you have GPS enabled on your Android unit, that doesn’t mean it’s continuously tracking your position with GPS; it just means that if one of your apps needs a GPS position, it can turn on active GPS tracking to obtain that position. The problem is that sometimes it can take several minutes to achieve an initial position fix with GPS, which means the program will just sit and wait until it obtains that position. The following two apps can help with this problem by making sure you have a reasonably fresh GPS position acquisition, which reduces the time for subsequent position acquisitions significantly.
Application Name: GPS Assist
Description: Turns GPS tracking on.
Publisher’s website: Luck Of Wise
Cost: Free
Version/date reviewed: v.1.0 / 8-23-10
Phone/OS: Droid X / Android 2.2
Android market link (mobile app)
Android Market (browser)
GPS Assist is the less-aggressive of the two programs; it will activate GPS tracking, but only leave it on for five minutes at a time.
Figure 1: Starting up the program, and selecting Enable, will bring up the “radar dish” icon in the status bar at top. Selecting “Enable automatic start” will start up the program whenever you turn your phone on, and also start up GPS tracking for five minutes. This is a good way to make sure your unit has a good GPS position fix right after being turned on; subsequent GPS fixes from applications should only take a few seconds, as the initial position/satellite data is good for about 4 hours in speeding up GPS acquisition.
To start up GPS Assist, bring down the Notifications bar from the top …
Figure 2: If GPS Assist is running and GPS acquisition is turned on, as it is here, you’ll see the GPS icon in the status bar. Pressing on GPS Assist / Stop GPS Assist will turn it off. If it’s off, the GPS Assist entry will say “Start GPS Assist”, and pressing on that will start up GPS acquisition. To turn off GPS Assist completely, removing it from the status bar, go to the program screen above and uncheck both boxes – that will shut it off.
Other Issues:
The biggest drawback is that GPS Assist will only run for five minutes at a time; if you need longer, you should look at the next program. But the five-minute limit can also be a plus, since it will minimize battery drain.
Final Thoughts:
The automatic start feature is nice to have, since it guarantees you a fresh GPS position fix every time you turn your unit on, and that will speed up subsequent GPS position fixes from actual applications. It would be nice to have the option for more than five minutes of GPS acquisition time, but that’s a minor quibble. If you need this capability, this is a decent app with minimal memory and CPU requirements, and the price is right.
Application Name: Tracker Booster
Description: Keeps GPS tracking active.
Publisher’s website: Droid Projects
Cost: Free
Version/date reviewed: v.1.1 / 8-23-10
Phone/OS: Droid X / Android 2.2
Android market link (mobile app only)
Android Market (browser)
If you need a continuous GPS acquisition, so that there won’t ever be any significant delay in GPS position acquisition when you start up an app that needs it, Tracker Booster is your app. Unlike GPS Assist, it runs continuously, and won’t turn off until you turn it off. But if you turn it on and forget it, it can drain your battery.
Figure 3: Not a lot to the interface. Press Start Booster to turn it on, Stop Booster to turn it off. Send to Background keeps the program running, but closes the interface. You’ll know it’s running because of the blue circle / right arrow icon in the status bar; you’ll also see the standard GPS signal icon as well.
Figure 4: If Tracker Booster is running, you’ll see the program Notification listing. Select that to bring up the main program interface above, and shut the program down if it’s no longer needed.
Other Issues:
Can’ts stress this enough: If you forget it’s on, you can drain the battery down. A time limit option would be a useful addition, or possibly the option to shut it down when the battery drops below a certain level.
Final thoughts:
If you need continuous GPS acquisition, this is a simple and easy way to do it. Just don’t forget you have it running, or you might drain your battery dry.
Tracker Booster offers an easy way to judge just how bad GPS battery drain is, and I’ll look at that in the next post.
Application Name: Compass
Description: Digital compass with geodata export to Catch Notes.
Publisher’s website: Snaptic
Cost: Free
Version/date reviewed: v.2.0 / 10-1-10
Phone/OS: Droid X / Android 2.2
Android market link (mobile app only)
Android Market (browser)
Snaptic’s Compass app is no secret – from the download stats, it appears to be the most popular compass app on the Android Marketplace. And there’s a reason for that – if I could have one only compass on my Android phone, this would be the one.
 Analog |
 Antique |
 Digital |
 Night |
 Simple Digital |
Figure 1: With all models except the Simple Digital, you can click and drag on the outer degree ring to get it to line up with the arrow. Simple Digital rotates the ring automatically so that the direction you’re facing is always at the top; this is my preferred compass, though I wish they’d add a North arrow indicator to it as well.
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There’s also a “GPS” compass that shows additional info. Additional data includes GPS data like accuracy, elevation and number of visible satellites. |
There’s a Settings page accessible using the Menu button. In addition to True/Magnetic North, Settings lets you:
- Adjust the noise filter to damp out variations in the reading
- Choose the orientation sensor
- Set the update rate
- Whether to display your GPS location and address at top
- Set units for distance, location and speed
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All these features by themselves would make Compass a great app to have. But what puts it over the top is the small “Note This Location” tab at the top, below the address/location info. If you have the notetaking app Catch Notes installed on your unit, it will take basic location info and automatically … |
 |
… insert it into a Catch Note. The Settings menu lets you choose up to five different parameters to export: altitude, direction, address, geographic coordinates, and speed; in this example, I’m only doing altitude, direction and coordinates. |
This note-export feature is awesome, especially combined with Catch Note’s ability to add a photo to the note. For example, you could determine a direction you want to take a photo in, export that data to a note, then take the photo and have all that data associated with it. If you have photo geotagging turned off for security reasons, this lets you save geo-information for a photo in a more secure way. And all this info, especially location and direction, makes creating a Google Earth PhotoOverlay a snap.
Issues/Wishlist:
Nothing major.
- “Magnetic” indicator on the GPS compass display doesn’t change even the compass is set to True North.
- Additional coordinate systems available as an option would be great (UTM, MGRS, OSGB, etc.)
- Additional note data export parameters desired: Date/time, GPS accuracy.
Calibrate menu listing should start up compass calibration, instead of just showing the pattern you should move the unit in during calibration. Seems to be working now. Given its limited movement pattern, I’d recommend using the unit’s standard calibration procedure, usually found in the Settings menu under location.
Final thoughts:
This is a no-brainer; if you’re using your Android as a geography tool, you have to have both Compass and Catch Notes installed. They’d be a bargain even if you had to pay for them; free, they’re a steal.
Revisions:
10/1/10 – Updated to reflect change of 3banana notes app to Catch Notes.
Application Name: Catch Notes
Description: Notepad with geotagging, picture embedding; online sync.
Publisher’s website: Snaptic
Cost: Free
Version/date reviewed: v.2.0.1 / 10-1-10
Phone/OS: Droid X / Android 2.2
Android market link (mobile app only)
Android Market (browser)
Catch Notes is a terrific free note-taking application for the Android platform from Snaptic.
Figure 1: From the main screen, tap on the “Enter A Private Note” to start up a note; tapping on the picture icon takes you automatically to your camera app to snap a shot. Here, I’ll just start out with a note …
Figure 2: Type whatever text you want into the box at top. You also can use the buttons at the bottom to:
- Take a single photo and attach it to the note (more below)
- Attach a single photo from your gallery to the note; this didn’t work for me on my Droid X, YMMV
- Scan a barcode and enter the data into your note. For regular 2D UPC codes, this enters the UPC number into your note; you’ll have to look up the product data separately. For QR codes, whatever data is embedded in the QR code will be entered into the note.
Figure 3: If I choose to take a picture, my camera app will start up, letting me shoot the photo. After the picture is taken, the menu at left shows up onscreen; I can choose to reshoot the photo, abort the photo, or click “Done” to accept the photo and go back to the note page.
Figure 4: A thumbnail of the photo shows up at the bottom of the screen. But the full-resolution photo is also saved on your unit, and can be downloaded to your computer later on. Add whatever additional notes you want, and save the note. Putting a hash tag (#) in front of a word marks it as a label for help in organizing/categorizing/sorting your notes.
Figure 5: A listing for the new note shows up on your main screen, along with picture thumbnail; tapping on the note listing will bring it up a full view of it for reading/editing. You can also share a note publicly via email or social network sites, or send it to other compatible apps on your unit (e.g. Evernote).
The little teardrop icon at lower left in the note listing indicates that I’ve turned on “Location tagging” and “Location pin” from the Settings menu; this embeds the latitude/longitude into the note info, and shows that the note is geotagged. However, the app seems to automatically reverse-geocode the lat/long and displays an address at the bottom of the note if one is nearby; seems you can’t choose to just display latitude/longitude. I hope they offer that option in the future, as well as the option to remove the geotagging data if you don’t want it. But tomorrow’s post will show a way to get around that limitation.
If a note is geotagged, you’ll have the option to “Show on Map” appear in the menu settings; this will display a placemark icon in Google Maps indicating where the note was created.
You have the option of signing up for a free account with Snaptic; if you do, notes can be synced onto your online account for viewing/editing/sharing:
If you’re not online, no problem – notes are saved locally, and can be synced later. You have the option of automatic syncing whenever there’s a connection, or manually starting the sync process whenever you like. Snaptic syncing also works with their AK Notepad app, which is a fine plain-vanilla note app by itself (but Catch Notes is better).
Final thoughts:
IMO, Catch Notes is the best basic note-taking app available for Android; it has just enough features to be useful, but not so many to make it difficult to learn. And online data sync is bonus. As-is, its geotagging capabilities are limited, but still useful. But there’s another app that significantly augments the geotagging of Catch Notes, and takes it to another level. That’s tomorrow’s post.
Revisions:
10/1/10 to reflect change of app’s name to “Catch Notes” from “3banana”
Application Name: BackCountry Navigator
Description: Topographic maps, GPS navigation.
Publisher’s website: BackCountry Navigator
Cost: $9.99; 15-day demo version available
Version/date reviewed: v.1.0 / 8-13-10
Phone/OS: Droid X / Android 2.2
Android Market (mobile app only)
Android Market (browser)
BackCountry Navigator can download and display maps and aerial photos from a variety of different sources:
- USGS 1:24K topographic maps, both in their original form and updated/terrain-shaded from MyTopo.com
- USGS 1-meter color and black & white (DOQQ) aerial photos
- OpenStreetMap road maps
- Landsat color satellite imagery (30-meter resolution)
- Topographic/aerial maps from Italy, Spain, Australia and Canada
If you have a good Internet connection, BackCountry Navigator will download/display maps on the fly. But it also lets you select an area, and then downloads those map tiles for use during times when your unit is offline.
Figure 1: Here’s the starting screen, with the excellent MyTopo.com US topo maps shown. A good part of the display at the bottom is taken up with demo info that will disappear if you buy the program; but even so, a lot of the maps is obscured by screen info and controls. You can expand the view to a “full-screen” option from the program menu, but even there, you only gain a bit of space at the top. I’d like to see the option of turning off unwanted controls, or having them only appear if you touch the screen, the way Gaia GPS handles them.The default view is with the GPS off, and the only way to turn it on or off is through the menu button; it would be nice to have a GPS on/off button onscreen. Also, that on-screen green arrow is only there to mark the north direction, not your actual position. The green arrow might be useful if you set the program to have your current direction of movement be up on the screen (where the map rotates to match your orientation), as it will give you a solid North reference. But if you have the map always set so that North is up, as I usually do, it doesn’t really serve any useful function, and obscures part of the map.
The controls at upper-left are for selecting an area of the map for downloading for offline use; I’d prefer to see those accessed from the menu, since you won’t be using those a good part of the time. The blue button at the upper-right moves you to successive screens, like the Compass and Trip Computer screens:
Figure 2: On the Compass screen,the outer dial of the compass can be rotated with your finger to get a bearing, but I don’t understand why there isn’t a simple digital readout that gives you your true compass heading without you having to spin the dial.
Figure 3: The Trip Computer is nice, though I’m hoping additional options will be added (e.g. time of day, distance traveled).
Figure 4: Selecting an area to download offline maps for is straightforward. Press the “Sculpt Map” button at top right (the map square with the green arrow on it), then click and drag in the map area to select the desired map you want maps downloaded for. Click the map square with the red “X” to de-select the area, and start anew.
Figure 5: When you’re ready, click the folder-with red-arrow icon to download the maps; you’ll get this screen that lets you select what kind of maps to download, and what zoom levels. The higher the zoom level, the more detail the map will have.Download times will depend on the zoom level selected (higher zooms mean longer times), the map area (larger is longer), and the responsiveness of the map server. Some servers, like those for standard USGS topo maps and black-and-white aerial photos, tended to hang during the download.
Figure 6: When the GPS tracking is turned on from the main menu, the controls at upper left change. The red flag lets you record a waypoint at your current location, and brings up a screen that lets you enter waypoint parameters.
Figure 7: But while you can change a waypoint position by modifying the coordinates, you can’t create a waypoint at a different location directly on the map screen, a major drawback.
The blue arrow (in Figure 6) brings your current position into the center if you’ve scrolled the map to a different location; the red button starts recording a track, and the blue button that appears during track recording turns it off again. In order to record any data, you have to have started a new trip file, or loaded a previous one, from the Menu => GPS Data options. There are instructions on the website on how to transfer a GPX file to your Android unit, and import that data into a trip file, but I was unsuccessful when I tried this – the import would just hang. And, as of yet, you can’t export data from this program into either GPX or KML format for use with other programs, which is a big minus.
Here are some examples of other maps available for viewing and download with this program:
 US aerial |
 Italian topo |
 Canadian topo |
 Australian aerial/road |
Other Issues:
The biggest problem I ran into with this program was that it crashed pretty much every time I used it out in the field, invoking the “Force Close” error message. This is a big problem if you’re recording a track or other data, as you lose everything you’ve recorded up to that point. These problems can often be unit-specific, so you might have better luck with yours. There also doesn’t seem to be a way currently to delete saved files to free up space; one you download a map file for offline use, you’re stuck with it taking up space even if you don’t need it anymore. I’d also like to see alternate coordinate systems/datums as an option, specifically UTM, since it’s often used in mapping.
Final Thoughts:
There’s a lot of useful features in this program I really like, like the US color aerial photos, and the topo/photo data from other countries. But at least on my phone (Droid X), the regular crashing of the program renders it unusable; you should check it thoroughly on your system with the 15-day demo to make sure it doesn’t do the same. And the current inability to export tracks and waypoints collected with this program is a major drawback. From the publisher’s website, it’s clear that he’s working on adding more features and fixing bugs, and I’m sure this program will become better with time; I expect to revisit it in a few months to see how it has progressed, and may change my opinion of it. But for now, I can’t recommend it, especially at the current price; I’d recommend Topo Maps/Gaia GPS as a better and cheaper alternative for those in the US who only need topographic maps.
Application Name: Topo Maps (aka Gaia GPS)
Description: Topographic maps, OSM maps, GPS navigation.
Publisher’s website: Gaia GPS
Cost: $7.99; Free limited Lite version available (with ads)
Version/date reviewed: v. 1.4 / 8-17-10
Phone/OS: Droid X / Android 2.2
Topo Maps (paid)
Android market link
Android Market (browser)
Topo Maps Lite
Android market link
Android Market (browser)
This is a port of the iPhone application Gaia GPS; the Android app is labeled “Gaia GPS”, but it’s listed as “Topo Maps” in the Android Market.
This application lets you upload and view USGS topographic maps and OpenStreetMap/CloudMade imagery in both online modes (loading map data on the fly), and offline modes (where you select map areas, and the imagery is cached for offline use). Map data loaded in online mode is also cached on the fly for offline use (up to 1000 tiles), so if you’re in an area where connectivity drops in and out, you won’t lose the map view. The Lite version limits the number of cached tiles to 50, which can cover a surprisingly large area; it also comes with ads. The full paid version lets you cache up to 10,000 tiles, which can cover a huge area. It also does GPS tracking, saves waypoints, and comes with a digital compass heading readout.
Map types available for download currently include:
- USGS topo maps from MyTopo.com; these are terrain-shaded, and look very good. But don’t expect road data to be fully up-to-date on these; some of these maps haven’t been updated in 30-odd years. In US National Forest areas, the update USFS topo maps are used, and these were updated as recently as 10 years ago. You’ll see a sample of this in the descriptions below.
- Five different map styles all based on OpenStreetMap data, which should have more up-to-date road data than the MyTopo maps. Because they’re all generated from the same data, it’s likely that you’ll only wind up using one or two of these on a regular basis. Unlike the MyTopo maps, which never had a problem download success with these CloudMade/OSM maps was spotty – sometimes they downloaded quickly, other times they took a while.
 Cloudmade Topo |
 OpenStreetMap Road |
 Cloudmade Road |
 Cloudmade Shaded |
 Midnight |
Figure 1: Samples of OpenStreetMap data. An alternate type of imagery, like USGS aerial photography or Google Maps views, would be a nice option to have.
Figure 2: You can set up the interface to be completely open and clutter-free, which is a nice touch. After you get a GPS lock, the orange arrow will show your current position.
Figure 3: Tap on the screen, and zoom in/out buttons will show up at the bottom. You’ll also get green arrows; tap on those, and you’ll have the option of displaying both your current coordinates at the bottom, and additional controls at upper right. To get rid of those again, just tap on the screen, then tap on the green arrows next to those on-screen displays. Coordinates supported include latitude/longitude, UTM, and MGRS, all in WGS84 datum.
The on-screen controls at upper-right will:
- Switch you into tracking mode (the bullseye pattern), where your position stays in the center as you move, and the map scrolls to keep you there. You can scroll the map manually by dragging, and this disables tracking mode until you press that control again.
- Set waypoints with the flag icon (more below)
- Choose the map type to display with the map icon; you’ll get a radio button list of available map types.
Figure 4: The latest version adds a digital compass bearing readout to the screen, which is a nice addition; you can turn this off in the Settings section if you want. It works best when you’re standing still; when you’re moving, the direction reading can become very unstable. The ad-supported Lite version blocks a fair amount of the screen at the bottom, though the coordinate display is still available.
Figure 5: Pressing the waypoint flag icon brings up three choices:
- Drop Pin – you scroll the map until the pin is where you want it, then set it at that position.
- Drop Pin Near Me – drops a pin at your current location, and lets you set a name for that waypoint
- Save My Location – Similar to “Drop Pin Near Me”, but saves a waypoint labeled “My Bookmark” with the date and time automatically appended, instead of you having to name that point.
Figure 6: From the menu, you can access the Download Map section to cache map tiles for offline use. This is available for all map types except Cloudmade Topo, which is a shame – that would be a useful type for areas outside the US where topo maps are hard to come by. You select the area you want to cache maps for by tapping and dragging; you’ll also need to select the highest zoom level you want maps for. Higher zooms mean better detail, but also require more map tiles to be downloaded.
Once an area is selected, you’ll enter a name for that downloaded map area, and optionally some notes. If you don’t need the map in the future, you have the option of deleting it, as well as deleting all map tiles cached during online use.
Other Issues:
The porting over from the iPhone version is still going on, and there’s a list of features that will be added in the near future on the website. You should check this to see whether any features you need will be added soon. For me, the major features still not in place include no track recording and no track/waypoint import or export, which severely limit this program’s utility.
I didn’t have any issues with program crashes or force-closes. However, sometimes the program will stop tracking your position on the map. Choosing the “My Location” mode from the menu, or turning tracking mode off and on will bring your screen position icon to the right spot, but the program sometimes doesn’t resume tracking after that; the only option is to exit and then re-start the program. Hopefully this will get fixed soon. As I mentioned above, MyTopo map tiles always downloaded reliably, but CloudMade and OpenStreetMap tiles wouldn’t always download as quickly. I also find it annoying that, like some other programs, Gaia GPS insists on loading itself into system memory on startup. As far as I’m concerned, unless it’s some kind of utility that needs to run continuously, no program should load itself into memory until the owner manually starts it up; when it exits, it should unload itself completely.
Final thoughts:
I like the program’s clean interface, and generally it works well. The current feature set is a little light to justify its current high price; I’d like to see the authors price it more reasonably now, and increase the price as the feature set improves. There are free programs that can do similar things, and I’ll be covering some of those in the near future. But those free apps usually require quite a bit of work to prepare topo maps for offline use, and Topo Maps / Gaia GPS simplifies that process tremendously. Overall, I would recommend at least trying out the free Lite version, and keep track of additional features being added. Personally, even though I have a full-featured demo version supplied by the publisher, I expect to buy a copy of this program in the near future for my own use.
At the time this post is being written, virtually all Android devices being sold and used are mobile phones. Most of these mobile phones come with data plans that can stream data (3G/4G) on demand; they also come with WiFi capability, so that you can get equivalent data directly off a wireless network. But what if you’re in an area that doesn’t have cellular data coverage or WiFi? For geodata, that can be a big problem.
1. Many commonly-used geographic apps, like Google Maps, Google Earth, Google Navigation, Layar, etc., require that a data connection be present to work. You can check this yourself by shutting off wireless data connectivity completely on your Android unit. Set it into “airplane mode” to turn off the cellphone connectivity, turn off the Wifi as well, then start up Google Maps. You may see a part of a map leftover from the last time you used it, but that’s it; zoom in/out, or scroll to a different area, and nothing will show up. You’ll eventually get an error message saying that the app can’t connect to the network.
Most people will spend most of their time in an area where some kind of wireless data connectivity is present. But if you check out the coverage map for Verizon, generally considered the carrier with the best overall coverage, you can see that there’s still a fair amount of the country that doesn’t have coverage, especially west of the Mississippi:
Zoom in closer, and you’ll see pockets of missing coverage even in areas that look completely solid above. Many of those area will never get decent data coverage, either because they’re too sparsely populated, or because topography/access makes coverage difficult to impossible to achieve. In those areas, online geodata will probably never be available, and your Android unit won’t be able to use geographic apps that require online access.
2. Phones had dominated Android unit sales up to now, but Android slates, tablets, media devices, etc. are coming soon. While some of these will have 3G/4G connectivity options, others won’t; that reduces their data connectivity coverage footprint to just those areas where they can get a WiFi connection. Adding 3G/4G connectivity can be expensive, $25-30 a month, exceeding the cost of the hardware over its lifetime. So are those units going to be limited to only having geodata available only where there’s WiFi? If so, their utility as mobile geography tools will be severely crippled.
3. Finally, some wireless data providers are looking at limiting data bandwidth; ATT has already capped monthly consumption at 2 GB a month, with massive charges if you run over, and Verizon has long been rumored to be looking at similar caps. If you’re downloading large amounts of geographic data over such connections, like aerial imagery, you could easily bump up against those limits. WiFi downloads won’t have those limitations, but if you’re going where there’s no WiFi, that’s not a big help.
The solution is obvious – the ability to store data for an area so that it will be available even if there’s no connection. In other words, “data caching”. That way, you could download large amounts of data for a specific area over a fast, cheap WiFi network, and then access it quickly in areas that either have no connectivity, or connectivity limited by bandwidth caps. I think the master vision of Google and the wireless companies is that we’ll always be connected, and therefore this won’t be an issue. But that’s not the case right now, and I doubt it ever will be. I hope that data caching will be added to apps like Google Maps and Earth that currently lack it, but I haven’t seen any signs of that coming soon.
However, there are already a number of Android apps currently available that can cache online map imagery for later use offline; other apps can take map data converted into special formats, and use it offline. I’ll be reviewing a fair number of those apps over the coming months, starting next week with reviews of two apps that cache topographic and OpenStreetMap data for offline use. They have limitations, and the range/types of data available through these offline apps doesn’t match that of online apps, but they make Android units geographically useful in places where they’d otherwise be useless.
While I’m on this topic, a tangential word of warning. I’ve been reading the specs of a number of Android devices slated to come out over the next six months, and most of them include “GPS”. But their definitions of what constitutes “GPS” seem to vary. With true GPS, they’re picking up signals from GPS satellites, and converting those to a location; these will work anywhere in the world, regardless of whether the units have access to wireless signals. But for some units, if you dig deeper into the specs, the manufacturers talk about “network GPS” or “antenna GPS”, where location is determined by how close they are to wireless hotspots or cellular base station antennas. This technique is a useful adjunct to true satellite GPS, especially in urban areas where satellite visibility can be blocked by tall buildings. But it’s not in any sense an acceptable substitute for true satellite GPS, and shouldn’t even be called “GPS”. Not only is it far less accurate than true GPS even in the best case, it doesn’t work at all if you’re out of range of the cellphone network or hotspots. If the specs say “assisted GPS”, that’s probably OK, but you should still read the fine print. True assisted GPS is a augmentation to satellite GPS: proximity to a cellular antenna is used to narrow down your initial location, and provide information that lets your unit pick up satellite data more quickly. But I’ve also seen “assisted GPS” used to describe units that pick up location data from antennas/hotspots; once again, not acceptable. If you want to record geographic data with your Android unit, accept no substitutes – only buy Android devices with true satellite GPS that works anywhere. End of rant.
The world of geography-related Android topics, hardware and software, is already huge, and will likely grow even faster in the near future. On the AndroGeoid site, I’ll try to cover that world as best as I can, looking at apps and techniques to help you make the most of your Android hardware and software in exploring, measuring, recording and mapping your world. This will include obvious, classic geography-related topics, like:
- GPS
- GIS (Geographic Information Systems)
- Map displays
- Compasses
- And so on …
But the website’s focus will range well beyond that, to topics that encompass some of Android’s more unique capabilities;
- Geographically-related Augmented Reality
- Location-linked online information resources
- Crowd-sourced data collection
- Measurement apps that take advantage of Android’s sensor suite (accelerometers, orientation, magnetic field)
- Applications for recording full sets of information linked to location: Coordinates, direction, orientation, notes, photos, videos, sound, panoramas, augmented/virtual reality, …
- … and as much other cool stuff as I can squeeze in…
The Android world is currently dominated by smartphones, connected wirelessly via 3G to the Internet, and I’ll cover apps that take advantage of that. But the ecosystem is likely to expand very soon to models that only come with WiFi connections, and even with smartphones there will be times when no connectivity is available. So, I’ll also cover apps that work with non-connected stand-alone Android devices.
And the name, AndroGeoid? Well, GeoAndroid was already taken 
. But AndroGeoid works for me: the geoid is:
that equipotential surface which would coincide exactly with the mean ocean surface of the Earth, if the oceans were in equilibrium, at rest, and extended through the continents …
So sayeth the almighty Wikipedia. In other words, all things geo-related to Android will flow downhill to the AndroGeoid, and you should definitely follow .
