Suppose you like to travel. Every year he will travel to some unknown cities during the holidays. When you visit a foreign city, the first thing you should look for is a street map of the city. You will most likely buy a paper map at the local bookstore when you get there. Without that paper map, you’ll be lost. Therefore, you must carry the paper map with you at all times. You will stand at the crossroads, look at the paper map and ask people how to go here and there.

Having a street map of the city on your mobile phone is the dream of every traveler. You do not need to carry a paper map with you. What you need is a mobile phone and an app that can display the city street map on your mobile phone.

Different type of mobile map application

There have been many attempts to create a city street map app for mobile phones in recent years. Some try to scan a paper map into a picture image and write an app to display these map images on the phone. Some try to connect to the map server, such as Google ac map, yahoo map from mobile phone and download map tiles from the Internet. All of these attempts are called the raster map approach because the map on the phone is just raster (group of mosaic images). The raster map approach has one big drawback: like the paper map, you can’t search for a specific street name or place name. You must scroll the raster map as you scroll the paper and find the street yourself.

There is another vector map of approach calls for mobile phones. The vector map has many advantages. Here name a few: you can search for the name of a street or a specific place, vector data is much smaller than raster data, you can even make the route, find the shortest route or the fastest route with a vector map (what which is impossible with a raster map). ..

Two years ago (2006), there was no vector street map app for mobile phones due to two main reasons: there was no free map data, the phone was not powerful enough…

Today (2008) mobile phones are getting more powerful in terms of having faster processor and more memory. Vector street map data can be found in the OpenStreetMap project. The two main reasons that prevent the development of the vector map no longer exist. It is possible to have a vector street map on your phone if you can find an app that can use vector map data from the OpenStreetMap project.

There are also many attempts to create vector maps for mobile phones. Some store the vector map on the phone, we call it offline vector map. Some retrieve vector data from the internet, we call it online vector map. Of course, if you go for an online approach, you have to pay for the data plan every time your phone downloads data from the map server. If you’re traveling in a foreign country, chances are you don’t have any mobile data plans to use. So the best approach is to use an offline vector map.

Tip to find the best mobile map app for your phone

To find the best offline vector map app for your phone, you should consider whether or not the app you plan to buy has the following features:

  • Offline vector map down to the street level of detail.
  • You can show the directional arrow on a one-way street
  • It can work with any bluetooth GPS receiver to track movement in real time.
  • You can zoom in/out/pan.
  • You can search point tag, street tag.
  • Fully touch screen compatible.
  • It can calculate the shortest/fastest route from the start of the waypoint to the end of the waypoint and guide you along the route.
  • You can rotate the map. When you use the real-time tracking movement and/or routing function, the application can rotate the map so that the facing direction (heading) is always “UP”.
  • Have voice guidance. As it guides you along the route whether by car or on foot, the app can tell you when to turn left or right.

Conclution:

  • Having a city street map on a mobile phone is every traveler’s dream. It is very useful when you are in a foreign city.
  • Vector map has many advantages over raster map: zoom in/out, search, rotate, route…
  • It is possible to make a vector street map for any city in the world (map data from the OpenStreetMap project)