^this.

The display battery issue can be handled with a USB battery, a short cable and a rubber band.

J

Well, google maps does basically all of this for free so...
Anyhow, the few times I wanted to make a custom route and have turn by turn prompts I just used google maps. Sure it has some deficiencies and glitches but it worked well enough and free, already installed, and I don't have to sign up for something or configure a profile, etc.

As far as battery life I haven't run into any concerns on trips of just a few hours using google along with endo (for tracking stats) with my screen cranked up full (but off most of the time) with cell and gps turned on. Additionally I have a whole extra battery, and then for multiday trips without possibility of charging I am shopping around now for one of the 18650 battery packs with usb plug.

I haven't been able to get Google Maps to work like this. I can import the GPX file but I can never get it to navigate with strict route following so in other words as soon as I start my route it takes the shortest path to the Finish point every time. I had this problem with Locus Pro until a member at the locus forum told me how to go into navigation settings and check the strict route guidance box. Once I did that Locus Pro Works beautifully. But I went into the settings of Google Maps and they did not have any setting to set to allow for this kind of guidance. So I'm under the impression Google Maps just will not work

That is rather strange, though admittedly it did happen to me I think twice on the first route I used it to navigate. If you create a custom route by dragging the route over certain locations those locations basically become internal destinations so instead of taking the shortest route to the end point it has to go to that 'spot' you put on the course, and then the next, and next. I have no idea why yours would do that all the time as I do not believe this is a feature that can be enabled or disabled it is just the way it is designed to work. A theory might be if you deviated from said course (or your gps is so inaccurate that it thinks you went off course) then maybe it forces it into recalculating and skips over your custom points and just goes to the end? The one trip it did that to me in the middle of the trip (presumably just a glitch) I simply exited out of google maps, went into my email where I had emailed myself the link to the custom route from my computer, and clicked it again relaunching google maps and all was well. Haven't used it that much so I can't say if this glitch is more common than I realize.

Well maybe that was the problem. I didn't use Google Maps to create my map. I used Ride with GPS to create the map and then I exported it as a GPX file and imported it into Google Maps.

Ah yes I've never imported anything to google, I start with google. It's not as great as it could be, but works well for this application for me, save for the couple aforementioned glitches. I believe I heard there was a limit on how many custom points you can make (meaning dragging the route to a certain spot to force it to go on some other path other than the quickest), I think I read 20 custom points but I don't really remember. I have not hit this limitation personally, the few times I've used it only required a few custom points to get it on the loop trip I wanted. I suppose if you exceeded said limit you could just split your trip into two halves for twice the limit.

My biggest issues using google maps was that I had to use my data plan both to retrieve the email with the link (can't create custom routes on phone best I can tell, had to do it on computer then email myself) and also data to load the map into memory if on the fly. I have a pay-as-you-go kind of cell phone and pay a few cents per Mb. I've seen now where they allow you to cache the maps into memory ahead of time, I haven't got a chance to try this yet. Presumably now one could get everything ready to go on wifi at home without using any data. The other issue is I can not tell which roads are gravel, and around here there are many. But as far as I am aware no mapping program distinguishes gravel roads, so I guess it's up to me to proof the course ahead of time.

For tracking stats and stuff I use Endomondo, and end up just running both it and google simultaneously in the background. Every once in a while a turn will be coming up while endomondo is trying to tell me what my last mile was, so the voices overlap, but that doesn't bother me. Endo has mapping feature to but I've only used it after the fact to create my workout when I didn't track it live. I don't know if you can use it effectively for navigation (like turn by turn directions). I suppose I ought to figure that out since I'm already using it.