I don’t want to hear about any GPS system for the iPhone that doesn’t include offline maps. Hell, someone could release a free GPS navigation for the iPhone and I still wouldn’t use it if it didn’t include offline maps. This weekend I decided to take a nice little mini vacation and head to Tremblant for some rest and relaxation. Being Father’s Day on Sunday, I figured I’d head straight from Tremblant to Cornwall (My Parent’s Hometown). I mean I had Google maps and my iPhone clearly showed me the way. I made sure I had some information written down just in case things went south with my phone, and away we went.
As you can see by the Google maps attached below, I had two options. I could go through Montreal, or I could head to Hawksbury and then head south to Cornwall. It looked simple enough, and there was no reason why I couldn’t shave off an hour of time by taking the most direct route.
It looks simple enough right? Well, you see that nice bend in the road below? It was a disaster of epic proportions. Seconds after making the turn, I felt like I was in a rodeo. No exaggeration. Two ginormous pot holes on a dirt road. I felt like I had run over a dinosaur. They came at us out of nowhere. My immediate exclamation, “Fuck that!” There was no way I was embarking on a road that started off that way, so I figured I’d just find my way to the next closest town and readjust my directions. Oh, wait. No signal. Zero. Nada. I was stuck in the middle of nowhere, with no idea where the hell I was going to go next, or how long it would take me before I could find some service. It was a disaster. My two and a half hour trip turned into a four hour trip and there was nothing I could do about it, because my piece of crap map on my iPhone didn’t have any maps stored on the device. Lesson learned.
So, AT&T, and any other company out there thinking you can sell as a GPS application for ten bucks a month, without having access to offline maps, is seriously deluding themselves. It’s not worth it. Do the math. Approximately 120.00 dollars a year to access a GSP system that going to leave you high and dry when you need it the most. Sounds like a crappy idea to me.
