Originally Posted by
chasmm
Personally speaking, my mobile phone is my emergency lifeline. If it's dead, in a worst case scenario, I could end up like it. I'm not doing a lot of rides in the wilderness of Long Island
, but I still want to have two separate devices for my bike computer and my phone. A phone with a dead battery is essentially a brick...and of very little use.
Charles
Precisely the point of issue #1 with there ALWAYS being a market for a purpose-built device.
The vast majority of phones don't have waterproof seals on the ports. Gotta get a big waterproof case.
The screens are absolutely the weak points when dealing with shock from drops and crashes. I've seen cracked Garmins, but VERY few shattered to the point they're unusable anymore. I've seen lots of smartphones damaged that badly.
I frequently go where cell reception does not exist. If I can't quickly and easily load my maps before I get into the field, then the GPS is not really useful to me. And for that matter, few phone GPSes work half as well as modern dedicated GPS receivers when they're outside cell range. Most cell phone companies put cheap, antiquated GPS receivers in there that lose accuracy or signal altogether under canopy when they're out of cell range.
The Magellan Toughcase addresses some of those issues for the i-users, but there's still the map caching problem to deal with. I hear on the grapevine that that's being worked on, but even with all those solutions in place, it doesn't make the smartphone "better" than a dedicated GPS receiver. It just makes it a more viable option than it was.