Product Description

Never get lost again with the Mapopolis MapPack for Palm OS Handhelds. Generate coast-to-coast, address-to-address directions right on your handheld (no internet connection or desktop required for route generation). The CD-ROM includes maps of the entire United States and major Canadian cities. Our CD loader makes loading just the right maps onto your handheld a breeze.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #20272 in Software
• Brand: Mapopolis
• Platforms: Windows NT, Mac, Windows 95, Unix, Windows 98, Windows 2000, Windows Me, Palm OS, Linux
• Format: CD-ROM
• Original language: English

Features

• Geographic coverage for North America and Western Europe
• Maps compatable with GPS devices (not included)
• Creates alternate routes if you get lost

Customer Reviews

Without peer for Palms, and now colorful.
I've been using Mapopolis maps since they were free, meaning I was one of many thousands of Palm/ Handspring users to shake out the bugs, offer improvements, and see the thing evolve from 1.x to its current 5.x release point. So why buy?

One, the maps are good. Imagine you have 160x160 resolution
for a minute (open up Paint or Paintbrush and make a 160x160
image to get an idea of how small that really is). You need
to map where something is in, say, New York City. Mapopolis
allows you to zoom out and find your main artery, say Sixth Avenue.

As you move roughly to where your intended map will be (say 200 Madison Avenue), you can zoom in, and more street names become visible. (Easily checked off if you prefer a more terse application). By the time you get down to street level, you'll not only see 200 Madison Avenue, but the side of the street it's on.

Two, zooming in and out is easy. Finding your location doesn't mean losing your overall picture.

Three, maps on Mapopolis are fast. While they aren't as pretty as a Mapquest map downloaded to your color PDA, they scale up and down, and show you the entire island of Manhattan. Nobody else gets you this much map for the money.

Four, you can forget about folding maps, finding maps, buying maps. You can store maps for everything within 200 miles of your house on a normal PDA; with a Memory Stick/SD/CF-enabled PDA, you can store maps for everything within 1000 miles. You'll run out of gas before you run out of map, and the form factor never changes.

For the money (and it's really economical (under forty) for an entire CD-ROM full of maps), there isn't anything close to Mapopolis.

One of the worst GPS navigation programs I've ever used
I have a lot of experience with GPS and when I was looking for mapping software to go on my Bluetooth, Mapopolis seemed to offer a lot for the money. It actually has a decent display and can navigate around town OK, which is why it has gotten some good reviews online. But if you really try to use it for serious navigating, it falls well short of what you should expect for the price.

The biggest problem Mapopolis has is selecting maps for navigating off of. You have to manually load maps, by name. If you knew the names of the places you were going so well, you probably wouldn't need a GPS! This is especially bad for the European maps, which have long names that go off the right side of the display - but there is no scroll bar to see the rest of the names! There is no interactive map for selecting maps, like on most serious GPS software. You can select individual maps off of the actual navigation display, along your route, but only if you already have a navigation solution! Do you see the Catch 22 there?

It also has a very clumsy interface for selecting your navigation destination. Normally you would type, say D-E-N if you were looking for Denver, and those names starting with DEN would pop up, the more letters you type, the more the options are narrowed down. But with Mapopolis, after you type the "E", it jumps from the "Ds" to the "Es". This can be very frustrating if you are dealing with a large map area. I have been half way to my destination some times before I finally got things working, and don't expect to do it while you're driving!

There are other very clumsy aspects to the interface, but it would take a lot of space to describe them all. The program also doesn't handle the maps well as you zoom out and bogs down the memory. Overall it's a very amateurish program.

I ended up writing off the money I spent on this as a waste, and went with a program called iGuidance which I much prefer. Incidentally, Mapopolis offers a money back guarantee within 30 days, but only if you haven't downloaded more than 4 maps (that's about 4 counties). So you won't see most of these problems if you limit yourself to 4 maps.

Palm GPS
It is too small. Not easy to use. I don't use it. It was a waste of money.