Navigation - Pro's and Con's of the different systems/Apps

[Polaris Overland]

On our long trips we use maps.me and googlemaps.
But our best map is a paper one. Blindly following a Satan’s you miss out on so much.
Also a warning. We have a Tom Tom and after Turkey heading east the world does not exist. They have no maps for Kazakhstan etc.
Our back up is a Garmin handheld with open source mapping that worked good for Russia when needed.

 

[Arno]

I used GAIA for a while but wasn't too happy with it at least for Europe as the available maps didn't really suit my needs regarding the amount if displayed information in different zoom levels and I was never happy with the map contrast / representation of different street and track types. Also I never found a way to easily add 3rd party offline maps, it looked to me like it is limited to the maps provided by their service.

I moved on to LocusMap on an Android tablet and found features and support of map sources to be almost ideal, however I prefer Apple for various reasons so I was searching for an iPad compatible solution for several month.

About six month ago I stumbled on Cartograph Pro (www.cartograph.eu) and use it since then. It is multi-platform (Apple iOS, Android, Windows, Mac) and I use it on an iPad now while on the trips and on Windows for my pre-trip plannings. It does support a lot of different map sources. Often I use OSM-based maps from www.openandromaps.org, but importing different 3rd party maps and even SQLite DB maps known from OruxMaps or LocusMap works great, so it is easy to include offline OSM maps, topo maps and even Sat maps which can also be layered if needed. I am very happy with this solution know and there are regular feature updates to it at the moment, so it seems to be a very active project.

For main roads / city navigation I use Sygic which is based on Tom Tom maps and available for Android and iOS.

 

[Constantin]

I used GAIA for a while but wasn't too happy with it at least for Europe as the available maps didn't really suit my needs regarding the amount if displayed information in different zoom levels and I was never happy with the map contrast / representation of different street and track types. Also I never found a way to easily add 3rd party offline maps, it looked to me like it is limited to the maps provided by their service.

I moved on to LocusMap on an Android tablet and found features and support of map sources to be almost ideal, however I prefer Apple for various reasons so I was searching for an iPad compatible solution for several month.

About six month ago I stumbled on Cartograph Pro (www.cartograph.eu) and use it since then. It is multi-platform (Apple iOS, Android, Windows, Mac) and I use it on an iPad now while on the trips and on Windows for my pre-trip plannings. It does support a lot of different map sources. Often I use OSM-based maps from www.openandromaps.org, but importing different 3rd party maps and even SQLite DB maps known from OruxMaps or LocusMap works great, so it is easy to include offline OSM maps, topo maps and even Sat maps which can also be layered if needed. I am very happy with this solution know and there are regular feature updates to it at the moment, so it seems to be a very active project.

For main roads / city navigation I use Sygic which is based on Tom Tom maps and available for Android and iOS.

Thank you for sharing your experience with the two!