For my recent trip to the Middle East, I ended up leaving the Garmin 705 at home. Even though it was indispensable in guiding me to small roads in Europe and New Zealand, there are no maps for it for Syria, Jordan and Egypt. And there was little point in collecting data on distances, speed, elevation gain, etc., because, well, I don’t care. I was, however, craving street maps of the urban areas I was visiting. And while I always take along or find paper maps, having a GPS as backup to confirm that you are where you think you are on a paper map is convenient.

I had had the MotionX app for the iPhone for some time, but I was still astonished when I was able to use it to download clear and detailed maps of the region.  I loaded all of these at varying levels of resolution (Zoom setting from 6 to 15, for those of you who use the app) to store on the phone. That way, I would not need to be connected to the network to look at the maps.  All the maps together took up a few gigs. The built in GPS was then able to project my location on the maps, and do all of the things one normally expects a GPS to do. It worked brilliantly: the maps showed even alleyways and dirt roads. As a bonus — though it didn’t seem so initially — the place names at most resolutions are in Arabic. This made it so I could show the phone to locals to confirm my directions and route. Even in that mobile-jaded context, where phones are routinely used for everything and far more than ever occurs to me, several people seemed surprised that such things could be on a phone.

Zoomed down to the street level