Offline Google Maps for Android

The more people rely on smartphones as personal navigation devices, the greater likelihood that they will find themselves out of luck when they’re out of range of a signal.
Google Maps users for Android can now download detailed maps of specific areas for offline use.
An update to Google Maps for Android this week helps prevent those who plan ahead from getting lost. Now, if you are going to a place that may not have Wi-Fi or cell service, you can click a location and download a map covering a 10-mile radius around that location.

The offline maps do not have all the features of the standard Google maps: You cannot get directions from place to place, look at a satellite view, or search for places nearby. But even without the interactive features, the maps could come in handy in a pinch.

The downloads can take several minutes. Google is not the first company to take note of this problem. There are a number of apps that allow users to download maps for offline use. My colleague John Biggs recently wrote about OffMaps, an iPhone app that costs 99 cents that will display maps offline; MapDroyd for Android does the same for free. Both use the OpenStreetMap framework, an alternative to Google maps.

Gaia GPS, available for both Android and iPhone, focuses on providing topographical maps to hikers. It comes in a free version with ads, and a full version that costs $10 for Android and a whopping $25 for iOS. Within the paid version, users can purchase additional maps such as snowmobiling maps and aerial photography of Florida.

But Google does not allow third-party developers to write apps that download Google Maps onto devices, so the search giant’s project is the first one that gives users access to those maps. Because it is free and integrated into the mapping service that comes with Android devices, it leaves third party developers with a tough challenge to overcome.

The new feature is available only for Android phones, and only those that run Android 2.1 or more recent versions. The company has no plans to make it available to iPhone users.

An earlier version of this post incorrectly stated that two other features — one that measured the distance between two sites and one that showed a scale of the map — were introduced this week. Both have existed since 2010.
source : gadgetwise