Best Offline Maps For Your Travels
At home, you’re familiar with directions, its easy to move around – you can do it blindly! But when you visit a new place, you’re basically starting from scratch.
Google maps is a life saver, if you have an internet connection. If you don’t, then MAPS.ME is one of the best offline maps and routing tool for your travel adventures.
Download it on your smartphone (link above is for iTunes app store, but it is also available for Android), its completely FREE!
Taking only 109mb of space, initially you can zoom in to countries, but you’ll need to download the country specific maps to zoom in further to get the street details – again, FREE!
You have the option to download just the map, or the map + the routing (giving you directions from your current position).
Edit 16 September 2015
The app has been updated and now gives you the option to download map + routing as the default. Also, to save you storage space you can uninstall certain maps so that you only have the ones you need, ready at your fingertips. Since the download sizes are relatively small, you could easily download new maps in a short amount of time.
There are two main routing options: car or walk. Car is the best option for now, since Walk is in beta. But it gives an approximate route that can still be useful for walking or public transport mapping.
So how does it work offline? Using GPS location from cell tower signals, it estimates your position and gives you the directions in real-time. This is really perfect for crossing borders, when you might have a sim card for one country but not the next. The GPS estimated location will be recognised by cell towers on both sides of the border, allowing you the comfort of seamless routes and mapping.
It works in all countries, so where will you go next?