Offline GPS Tracking on your Android phone

Hello,

I have recently bought a great app, Maverick Pro (its review on this blog) that allows to cache automatically Google Maps or any map sources available in the app itself. This is great as I am a big cyclist and I love discovering new roads around Dublin and I don't want to pay the DATA charges to download the maps.
However, while it's caching it automatically when connected to a Wifi AP, you have to browse around the area you want to be cached. And this needs to be done for every zoom level... So you can imagine how painful it can be...

So, I've found a JAVA app (working across Windows, MAC OS-X., etc..) that allows me to download the tiles from Google Maps from a selected area.

The interface is pretty simple. I'll come back to a more detailed review this JAVA app (Mobile Atlas Creator)

Once you have finished downloading the tiles, before you copy them on your MicroSD card, you need to prepare it.

Because the tiles are very small (with Google Maps Street), between 2KB and 12KB, you need to have your MicroSD card to be set with the smallest clusters possible.

For a 2GB card, the smallest is 512B

For a 8GB card, the smallest is 2KB

By default, clusters are usually set to 32KB which with 100,000 tiles can waste a lot of space.

In my case, I have downloaded 686,020 tiles on a 2GB car with 512B clusters, the tiles use 1.14GB of space. On a 8GB card with 2K clusters, all the tiles use 1.94GB of space. You could double that if the 8GB card was using 32K clusters... You can imagine how useful it is if you have only a small MicroSD card.

I'll explain later on how to format a MicroSD card with a different size of clusters.

So, with all those downloaded tiles, you can open Maverick Pro, without any WIFI or 3G connection, and browse around Google Maps like if you were connected to a network. It is really a good app for that which really worth the money.

I'll fully review the app later.

Cheers!