critical review here

I adore the concept of outback connectivity and such, tho I have not made the leap to iphoniness yet. I still struggle with the conversion from laying printed matter out on a table to get the big picture versus flipping between screens on the computer. The battery life issues seem to be addressable through spare battery, solar and manual generator technology. Any thoughts?

I haven't used the program referred to in that link, but I have used Motion X GPS on my iPhone and it is terrific. No problem with crashes. You have to download the area maps where you will be if you will be out of cell contact, but the download is quick and intuitive.

Battery use is an issue, but there are lots of portable power supplies.

The display and map detail is far superior to what I get on my Garmin 60. I did a side by side comparison of the app and my Garmin and accuracy was comparable.

Agreed. I've done the same thing.

BTW, iPhones don't have a replaceable battery pack so you would need a charging system. I use a brand called Just Mobile that gives my iPhone a little over 3 charges when I get <5% charge left. Its generic so if you have the cables you charge anything that uses a USB plug.

I also prefer hand held maps, or basic GPS for distance and direction to target but iPhones have phenomenal apps for mapping. I geocache and only use my iPhone app for that now rather than my GPS.

Loving the potential, and I have invested in a battery pack suitable for 3 days of typical use as well as a solar charger. However as mentioned in the article it has a long way to go and just isn't ready to replace a standalone GPS or map and compass. I'm the type who believes it will never be though, with my luck even if the technology matures I'd end up dropping my phone and breaking it lol

I still think it would be amazingly useful to be able to store and cache an area on google earth on your phone for offline use (say 10 mi x 10 mi max zoom and another few miles moderate zoom) that would work with GPS (either manual entry or through phone gps) to find your location on the map. Then you can literally have a birds eye view of the area you're in. If weather is bad, what's down that trail to the left? The right? Oh an abandoned cabin! lol

Although I don't have an iPhone, I do have an Android based phone which allows Google Maps to be auto cached offline. This is a handy feature as the cached area can be be significant in size and it also captures satellite view data.

With Google maps version 5.7 or higher, there is also the built-in functionality to cache user specific map sections for offline use. In summary, you long press on a spot of the map you want to cache then select an option that will then cache a 10 square mile offline map to your phone. I have not played around with this feature as much and appears it only caches street map data and not terrain or satellite view data.

And while these are both nice features to have, I would not bet my life on either as like anything electronic, the phone/batteries could fail at the worst possible time and right when you may need it the most.

I recently replaced my 2000ma LiPo USB battery with a 10000ma model that's about twice the size. It also can recharge my iPad, which the smaller battery could not do.

Being able to cache Google Maps would be an outstanding change for iPhone and iPad.

I've really liked iTopomaps but recently it's had some stability problems. Hopefully those will be resolved soon. I like what I'm seeing in MotionX, and at the price I plan to try it soon.

As much as I love my gadgetry, I don't go into wild places without a paper map and a compass. I'll fire up my GPS and drop a waypoint for sure, but after that I usually turn it off.