My apologies to Smiley for not remembering her nationality!
But I think being mistaken for Canadian is much better than being confused with most other North American countries!! And I know (virtually, anyway) some nice people who are Canadian!!
Hehehe... I didn't even thought anything about it. Her English is much better and she did went to college and worked in US for some years
500MB is more than enough. I have a 2 GB data plan with T-Mobile and rarely use more than 500 MB a month, and that's with GPS and turn-by-turn navigation and Web browsing and Netflix and all sorts of other stuff.
Wow, thanks Tacit. That's good to know
I told you I was going to write down what I did to test the Turn-By-Turn navigation from Google Maps so here it is.
It's a quote from an email I've send to Smiley since she said that two people at her work said you can't use Google Maps without having a data connection constantly on.
But since I feel very smart now, did lots of research on it, I can actually say 'Yes you can'
Back to Google Maps.
Yes, most people think you need to have a constant data connection to use Google Maps as it's all being streamed.
But this is not true, you can do without the constant connection as I tested on Monday.
So how to do this:
- Go to a (free) wi-fi zone, or make sure you have a data connection to start with (best also to empty Google Maps Cache on your phone first);
- Using a connection to the net, plot the destination you need on your phone;
- Once the destination is on Google Maps, select 'Navigation'. Google Maps will now plot navigational directions AND download that route to your phone's cache memory! <- This is what people don't realize!
- Once the navigation is on your screen, you're ready to go.
- You can now even terminate your data connection before heading off if you want to make sure that you are not using any data on the route.
This works!
The only drawback is that you can't navigate too far away from the plotted route as, at some point, the cached maps might not be available on your phone and data connection is needed for those.
For slight detours, it works staying offline.
I actually had this happening when I tested it, Google Maps plotted my way home using Park Way through Hyde Park, while the bus I was on obviously takes the main road.
Once the bus did it's turn, a few seconds later Google Maps re-plotted the route using the road we were on WITHOUT going online (as I switched off my data connection to start with).
One way around this is to cache the area you might going for a detour to your cell phone as well.
Like I showed you yesterday, you can actually cache areas of 10 square miles to your cell phone (without using them in your directions) for offline use.
Pretty neat feature I would say but it needs to be activated through Google Maps Labs.
With this I also want to apologize... I realized a few days ago that this is sooooo NOT apple related!
