having recently gotten my first smartass phone, had to let you know that made me chuckle.

I can't take claim for that...friend of mine told me that after I sent her an "off color" text...

Aaron

I've got a GPS unit and I've used it for navigation on some tours. I wish I had done this the last time I was out since I spent time in a number of cities trying to find my way around. On the highway, the GPS is handy because of its elevation feature. I use this often since most of my touring is in mountainous areas.

I don't want to switch to a smart phone for navigation since I'm often touring in areas where cell coverage is not available. The GPS does not have that limitation.

I highly recommend the landscape pages from the Road and Recreation Atlas by Benchmark Maps, available for various western states. These are better than the Delorme maps. I cut these maps out and trim the margins so they will fit neatly into a 12"x12" Aloksak, after folding in half. I've used these maps for tours of the Mojave area and the Nevada backcountry, in conjunction with the maps loaded on my Nokia N8 smartphone and a Garmin Foretrex 301 GPS, which gives location only (no maps). Neither the Benchmark nor Nokia maps show all the dirt roads, and the ones they do show are often wrong, but using all these tools together is enough to get me around. Mind you, I only need good maps and GPS location when I'm on dirt roads. If I was sticking to paved roads, just about any map would suffice.

I would be hesitant to use electronic maps only, due to possibility of the gizmo breaking in the field. At a minimum, I would want a paper road map at 1:1,000,000 scale or better. A small scale map like that is also very nice for getting an overview of the area.

Modern smartphones allow you to download maps to the phone and use it offline. My Nokia N8 has maps for the entire world available. For the iPhone, visit this excellent site:
https://adventurealan.com/iphone4gps.htm

Agree. I already had a Garmin 2595 LMT car GPS. I bought a RAM handlebar mount and an external battery, so far its worked just fine, I expect it'll last about 6 hours combined as long as I use it only when its required. Though I also have the ACA TransAM maps, indyfabz says that it is quite boring thru Kansas and probably other states if you don't plan to camp ( I don't) so I'll experiment with Hwy 50 from Pueblo unless I run into any problems. Another tip I got from one of the threads here or maybe on CGOAB is not to use the bike mode in Googlemaps buts to use the No Freeway option. This uses lesser known roads but since its still car navigable I am assumimg it won't lead off into, hillside tracks cow paths and muddy county roads...

Some phones, like my Nokia C6-01, have awfully slow gps receivers. If totally offline one has to wait for about 30 minutes to get the position. 30 minutes each time the position is lost, that's too much.
With A-gps it's a matter of 30 seconds to get the approximate position which is refined then by the GPS signal, this is why those smartphones like mine are only useful when there is some cell coverage available.

External bluetooth GPS receiver would solve the problem, but it's too much of gizmos when better solutions are available for less money.

Yikes! Yes, I can 30 minutes ruling out your smartphone. It's more like 2 minute for my Nokia N8 to get a GPS fix when offline (no network assist) for the first fix of the day, then about 1 minute thereafter. This is in open desert territory. That's perfectly acceptable to me, since I only resort to the Nokia when I'm scratching my head over the paper map, which happen only ever few days on my recent tours. The iPhone supposedly also has good GPS reception.

We used our GPS, a garmin 60 CSX conbines with Ciy Navigator Europe NT, for a 3 month European tour. It saved us hours (probably days) navigating through the larger cities. It also covered all roads throughout the countries we travelled through. What it was really good for was finding rooms and campgrounds. The amount of information stored in the "points of Interest" file is amazing, and pretty accurate.

However, we still ended up with 11 pounds of maps, most of which were mailed home as we finished with them. A lot of them were local town maps and tourist information to supplement our journal information. Michelin has some great regional maps, but they are large scale, and you can "ride across a map" in a day or two. The GPS map programs seldom have bike paths on them, which is not a major issue.

I've never used a GPS unit in the US for bike touring. I can get maps almost anywhere, and can understand instructions from local people. I do plan on taking it on our next tour here in the US just for the lodging and campground informaton available on Garmin's map peograms. We seldom plan our trips in much detail before we start a ride. We know our general route, and just figure out the specifics far enough ahead so we don't get into an undesireable situation with camgrounds, motels, water etc. When we started our European tour, other than knowing what cities we wanted to see, only the route for the first 2 days was planned. That changed on the first day when we talked to a ticket agent at a ferry terminal who showed us a better route to get where we wanted to go.

Paper maps and GPS units are both good navigational tools. When route planning remember to leave some room for serindipity!

I always have paper maps on hand.

I wish mine was as quick as N8.. They are more or less the same generation, but obviously this gps hardware in my phone sucks (this problem is recognized by Nokia). Something to consider when buying a new device.

I have embraced GPS technology for other activities including trail running, hiking, and sailing, but have never warmed up to it that much for bike touring. I find their battery hungry nature to be more hassle than they are worth. I do have a smart phone as a backup, but leave it turned off except when using it. BTW, it seems to get a fix in 1-2 minutes on the rare occasions that I use the GPS.

I go with paper maps, but once in a while do use my phone to find services or local directions in town. If on an AC route I like their maps but since I tend to deviate from their route I usually pick up state maps as I go. I either give them away, discard them, or mail them home when I leave a state. If I have trouble finding a state map I am likely to use the phone's GPS more.

Love my Garmin GPSMap60cx. I've been uploading waypoint maps of our annual WI trip for 10 years (different route every year). I prefer non-rechargable because it's easier to replace batteries when needed. 16 hr battery life. I love the route representation on a moving map display with turn-reminder beeps, etc. Smartphones are unreadable in bright sunlight, their batteries don't last anywhere near long enough, and out-of-coverage issues make them useless (SW Wisconsin is notorious for no coverage). I've found I'm constantly reminding or correcting the paper maps folks during the trip and I don't have to stop for page changes.

Doug, I've been rather "anti GPS" in my mindset for years, but your comments of less messing about in urban centers and the "points of interest" certainly lessen my stubbornness on the subject. I think a big part of it also was getting a smartphone and seeing the practical side of the technology.
David

state maps, basic or with bike trails, if you laminate them, they'll last forever and never get wet... or run out of batteries.

I am kind of surprised to hear the "laminate them" recommendation. I figured that maps are heavy enough without laminating them and on a long-ish US tour there will likely be a 10 more state maps to carry. Also laminated maps don't fold well with the lamination materials that I have seen and I have to wonder how you laminate a large map like the Texas state map.

So I am curious. Do you just laminate smaller map sections? Do you have some thinner, lighter, more flexible stuff to laminate with? Probably kind of moot for me since I've never had a map not last long enough to cross a state, but I am curious.

I just want to clarify, because all 3 statements in the above statement are false for my Nokia N8.

1) Display is very readable in the brightest sunlight possible (desert southwest with clear skies and reflections from sand).

2) Battery lasts for a week or so if I have the phone in offline mode (no cellphone or wifi connection) and suspend the phone when not actually using it (it turns back on instantly when I unsuspend), assuming I use the phone for maybe 20 minutes a day of GPS mapping, plus 3 or so photos/day with the camera (which is the only camera I carry and adequate for my purposes). [Actually, I've never had the battery fall below 80% while touring, so battery life might well be several weeks. I check into a motel at least every 5 days or so and recharge the battery then.]

3) High-quality Navteq maps are stored on the Nokia N8 itself, so no network connection is needed. This is different from non-Nokia phones. Nokia owns Navteq, which is one of the major suppliers of professional quality maps, which is why they are the only phone maker who stores maps on the phone by default. The other phone makers have to pay Nokia or some other company for maps, and so they try to make the money back via advertising, which requires a network connection. This is why Google makes it cumbersome too download Google maps offline to Android phone, because that would cut into their advertisign revenues. iPhone gets its maps from Google and so has the same problem. There are some apps for Android and iPhone which allow you to get around these restrictions, but they don't work as seamlessly as with the Nokia. Basically, when you buy the Nokia N8 (and perhaps other modern Nokia smartphones, I'm not sure), you also get a mapping GPS, better in display quality than Garmin or Magellan or TomTom, with high-quality road maps (not topos however), and all maps for the entire world are free forever, and no network connection is required. Because maps take up quite a bit of space, by default Nokia only loads the maps for the region where you bought the phone. Thus phone bought in the US by default have maps for North America. It is a trivial matter to go into the map program and request the map loader to download maps for other regions. As noted, these maps are large, like 1GB for maps for all of France. The Nokia includes 16GB of internal memory and allows installing a 16GB micro-SD card, so storage shouldn't be a problem for most people.

I'm not trying to be a Nokia fanboy, and there are certainly things I don't like about the Nokia (the screen is smaller than I'd prefer and there are few apps) but I can't just let the above misreprentations stand either. I bought the Nokia N8 precisely because of its long battery life (partly due to the supposedly crappy Symbian^3 operating system, which is very efficient) and because it allows me to combine offline mapping GPS, camera and smartphone into a single device.

I stand by my statements. There's no back lit transmissive display made that's anything but faint in bright sunlight. The purpose-made outdoor transreflective displays are actually better in sunlight than indoors. The brighter the sun, the clearer the display. Regarding battery life, you're comparing 20 minutes a day against 10 hrs full on, non stop, all day use of an outdoor GPS? Your GPS and your display (especially if it's full-on trying to overcome sunlight) would waste the battery very quickly. I do acknowledge the downnloading of maps allows you to turn the phone off, but it's display and GPS that depletes battery more than the radio.

I've never used a Garmin or similar mapping GPS outdoors, but I've looked at them in the REI store and read reviews which complain about the display performance outdoors. These are not high-contrast AMOLED displays like on a good smartphone. Have you ever used a modern smartphone like the iPhone 4? The Kindle and other e-readers is a different story. E-ink really does work better in sunshine. But that's irrelevant since e-readers would suck as mapping gps's due to the lack of pinch to zoom.

I'm having a hard time understanding why you need GPS turned on 10 hours/day. First, I don't want to ride 10 hours/day. Second, most of the time when I'm riding (or driving in a car for that matter), I'm just following the road and I know which turns to take. There simply aren't that many turns to take outside of cities. I'm certainly not going to be staring at my GPS for 10 hours/day. So the only time I consult the GPS is to plan my route and refresh my memory at critical intersections. 20 minutes a day for that is plenty. Unsuspend the phone, look at the map, maybe pinch and zoom to see the context, then suspend the phone again--takes about 30 seconds total, at max. If I need GPS to find my current location, that 30 seconds becomes maybe 2 minutes. 10 such uses/day should be more then sufficient for the areas I tour.

Maybe you plan to rely on your Garmin mapping GPS as your sole map. In that case, battery life would indeed become an issue. I would never rely solely on a mapping GPS myself, due to the possibility of electronics failing outdoors. Also, big paper maps always give a better overview than small displays. But even with a mapping GPS as your sole map, I still don't think you'd need 10 hours/day of staring at the map. Maybe 1 hour/day max. It is true the GPS drains the battery faster, but then you don't need the GPS turned on most of the time. Most of that 1 hour usage/day would involve panning around to plan your route--the sort of thing I prefer to do with a big paper map. Both the Nokia N8 and iPhone will give at least 10 hours of usage in offline mode. So all you have to do is stop in at a motel, campground, cafe, laundramate or other facility where you can borrow electricity more frequently than once every 10 days.

I do bring along a separate Garmin Foretrex 301 non-mapping GPS, which is waterproof and has 12 hour battery life. As with the phone, I certainly don't keep this device switched on all day. Rather I only use it when the phone won't work (such as in deep canyons or under trees, due to lack of a SIRF chip) or when it is raining (since my phone doesn't have a waterproof container, though these are available). Like I said, I find it difficult to get lost when sticking to roads, as I do when cycling, even dirt roads not shown properly on my paper maps or the smartphone maps. Hiking is a different story, and then I use this GPS more frequently (maybe 3 times a day on the Pacific Crest trail in some areas where trail junctions are poorly indicated).

Here is that link to the guide to using the iPhone as a mapping GPS (I'm repeating this because everyone should read this page who has any interest in the subject of mapping GPS's, whether or not you use an iPhone):
https://adventurealan.com/iphone4gps.htm

Hi revelo, I have a Samsung Galaxy II which has a 5" AMOLED screen. Beautiful display but impractical for a cell phone. It eats the battery within 12 hours even on standby, It seems Samsung forgot the main use for a smart phone, i.e. it has to work first.... also it does not do that well in bright sunshine, I have to shade it w/my palm to read it. But I do agree with you that it probably is not necessary to keep a GPS switched on for hours continuously on a bike. Though I am no expert yet. I plan to use my car GPS w/external battery on my trip so in about a couple of months or so I can report back. Its tested well on short rides and I don't see why it won't work for longer periods.

Definitely possible, you can plan your route in advance and upload it to your GPS so you get a nice map showing what's around you with a nice fat line showing where you're meant to be going.

If you have a problem with your GPS (which could be anything from running out of battery to crashing hard and breaking it or having it stolen) you'll want a fallback, which is where paper maps come into their own.

If you do plan a route and put it in your GPS so you can follow it just make sure the route is suitable for cycling. Satellite view and street view will help immensely with this. I planned a route (much shorter than yours, about 80 miles) using multiple maps and had to tweak it several times as I didn't want to get 70 miles in and find myself lifting the bike over stiles to push through six inches of wet mud for half a mile, or ride up a 10% incline for half a mile on a 70mph road with nowhere to get out of the way.

Try touring in Western Europe. There are minor roads and alternative, often counter-intuitive, routes everywhere.

I haven't toured with a dedicated GPS. I have used google maps, but wouldn't rely on them for the reasons cited above, especially the fact that network coverage is not ubiquitous. And call me old-fashioned, but I like paper maps, there's something aesthetically pleasing as well as practical about them.

When I used a GPSMap60CSx I mounted it to my handlebars and I could read it in any conditions except night riding, and at night I could put the backlight on.

Now I use a Montana 650 and still find it perfectly readable in any light except darkness, which is also fixed with the backlight.

Both systems would give me 12 hours or more on a battery charge (obviously less if you use the backlight all the time), so on a cycling tour I'd normally expect to get an entire day's riding out of a set of batteries. AA cells are small enough to carry a few spares, and easy to buy just about anywhere. On a tour where you're sleeping somewhere with mains electricity you can charge all your batteries overnight.

@SFGary:

Nokia N8 has rated 400 hours (16 days) standby, from a 1200mAh battery. This seems close to reality in my experience. I didn't have to jump through hoops to keep my device from draining the battery on a recent tour. Just set airline mode (no network, no wifi) and keep it on standby other than when I was using it.

iPhone 42 has rated 200 hours (8 days) standby, which is half that of the N8. Based on the article I linked to, this seem close to reality, assuming you follow the guidelines in that article for battery conservation.

Galaxy II has rated 610 hours standby (25 days), from a 1650mAh battery. However, there are complaints all over the place, such as yours, that Android devices don't actually get anywhere near the rated talk or standby times.

Unlike Symbian^3 and iOS, Android was not really designed from the ground up for efficiency. Symbian^3 is particularly efficient, because it has its roots in the old days of underpowered smartphones. Of course, for the same reason, Symbian^3 feels clunky compared to iOS and Android, and there are few apps written for it. But I'm less concerned about downloadable apps than the big 4 builtin functions (voice communications, offline mapping GPS, camera, web browser) and my N8 does those quite well. My major complaints about the N8 are: (a) no support for common VPN protocols (PPTP, L2TP, etc); (b) screen too small for effective web browsing or data entry or use as e-reader; (c) no kindle app.

You really need to check these units out in bright sunlight. The transreflective displays completely blow away anything any smartphone has for bright sunlight conditions. (I run the mobility section of a proof-of-concept lab and receive a half dozen new, sample, and prototype smartphones and tablets every month, --so I pretty much know every kind of display on every smartphone made). At least you should google what transreflective displays are. Any criticism of transreflective displays would refer to low light (dusk or indoor) where you're not quite ready to turn on its backlight. And those are accurate criticisms.

And I do use the GPS for my primary mapping device. As to why I use it for 10 hours, --I would turn the question around and ask why not. We ride long and complicated routes with dozens to many dozens of turns every day. I wouldn't want to have to turn my GPS back on again at every decision point. And we frequently encounter unmarked country intersections. The map folks are sometimes stumped while my GPS shows a highlighted route on a moving map display. Often the "map" folks look to me to resolve uncertainties. And when I ride sweep for a large group including kids I need to stay exactly on the planned route. These are pre-planned routes that are either printed out as paper pages (maybe 20 pages per day) or waypoints uploaded to GPS devices like my GPSMap60Cx. These things are actually very useful for long tours.