A smartphone could have an onboard map today. It's a conscious choice by google to make it work the way it does. Look at TomTom or any other navigator (and possibly some smartphone apps too) that come with integrated maps.

That service is just grafted on there, it's not a necessity.

It's the google way of doing things.

Actually, Google Maps allow you to cache portions of maps for offline use: https://support.google.com/gmm/answer/2650377?hl=en

There are other navigation apps that do store offline maps; the reason they're not popular outside of outdoor enthusiasts is that they take up a huge amount of space. It seems like a reasonable trade-off to me.

Nokia somehow manages to do offline maps just fine - you can download maps of the countries/cities you need separately and they take up no more than about a hundred MBs each.

Since when is caching a substitute for integration?

I'm not sure I understand what you mean by integration; are you proposing that the mapping app contain the complete map data, which is then occasionally updated as needed? There's a clear advantage to not storing several GB of data you rarely if ever need on a device with very limited storage space.

Flash is a commodity, a typical navigation device will store all the maps for all of Europe including the most crazy little roads and cost a relatively small fraction of a cell phone, includes a good chunk of the hardware and comes with an SD slot for upgrades.

Cell phones could easily provide navigation capabilities for at least the country of origin of the buyer and several around it if the creators decided this was a desirable thing.

All of the US is 1GB. See here: (dutch):

http://www.laptopshop.nl/vragen/29528/115735/tomtom-navigato...

Flash runs a few $ / G. Of course your phone manufacturer will screw you completely on the memory when you buy it (the price difference between a 16G and a 32G phone is ridiculous, but I guess I can't fault them as long as people fall for tricks like that).

>a typical navigation device will store all the maps for all of Europe

Yeah but it won't also have several GB of games, audio, apps and photos on it as well. People would cry bloody murder if they found out google was using 7 GB of space to cache the world map by default.

If you are a person who needs a world map at their fingertips there are apps for that but the average person just needs google maps to figure out what turn the should take occasionally.

If they paid $3 for that 7GB they'd be fine with it. It's not like you have to store that stuff in RAM.

And this is all especially true if we start seeing memristor arrays replacing flash chips in mobile devices; at that point, the few GB it would take to store a worldwide transportation map would be pocket change.

StreetView is a useful, if expensive to implement, addition to maps, and doesn't fit on a phone (yet)

StreetView is overkill to me, basic navigation is pretty much a must, even if you have no dataplan. But of course that's not the way smartphones are being marketed.

I've been holding out from the smartphone revolution for quite a while now, but a phone that would do off-line navigation would be a good thing because that means one less thing to carry along.

I don't like having services forced upon me when a single download would suffice.

Check out MapsWithMe - OpenStreetMap packaged as a basic mapping app, paid pro package for more than basic mapping/location pointing. The OSM db is segmented by country/province/US state so you can tailor the size / coverage as desired.

Haven't looked at the pro pricing or feature list, just having maps that my off-network, GPS equipped old brick can use near home is sweet enough.

I tried MapsWithMe, but those are only maps, no navigation.

If you use Android, check out OsmAnd. It uses the same OSM maps, has navigation (with voice pack too) and it's free for up to 8 countries IIRC. I have been using it for about three months and it works pretty good.

The only problem I found is that city names for some countries are in local language, so if you go to Greece for example, you would have to type in the names in Greek letters. It they fixed this, it would be perfect.

There is setting for the names (but I think there have been people on the OSMand mailing list having issues with it). The English names would also have to be present in the OSM data (not for any particular technical reason, just as far as I'm aware that is the only source of names the devs use for the maps).

Also, the free version allows for 10 downloads, where updating a previously downloaded map (which might only be a region of a country) counts as one of them. But the paid version is only $8.

Thank you, I will!

Not to derail the topic - but maps already does that.

Search for your area. Pull up info sheet for it. Click "Save map to use offline". (Although I've got no idea if it checks for changes)

Didn't that disappear in some recent version? I had to use some special keyword search term to make that happen in the newest Maps.

It did disappear. And fortunately, they've added it back again, in yet another UX interaction.

https://support.google.com/gmm/answer/3273567?hl=en

that's the interaction groby_b just described

However "You can move and zoom in or out on your saved map, but you can’t search or get directions on it."

Reduced the utility considerably imho.

Both Navigon and Co-Pilot (on Android) can store the entire U.S. in about 1.5 GB.

Google maps does check for changes, but in a sort of braindead way. Every 30 days it'll check for map updates, and if it can't (e.g. no internet connection) it'll just delete your locally saved maps.

This is starting to sound like a Version Control type solution where you just update your Wikipedia every now and then and it merges the new info.

I ended up looking into this a little while back as an emergency kit type thing. Wikipedia is useful - and tells me how to do a lot of things. In a disaster, I probably don't have internet. So it would be a good idea to have local wikipedia.

Zim reader was the best I could do, and still is the best at the moment. But I would be totally fine with dedicating a few terabytes to keeping much more complete local archives on my file-server if the update process was reasonably automatic (something like bittorrent would be great).

Urgh not Zim - Kiwix. Kiwix is the best I could do.

Zim is a desktop wiki app.