Need a map ?

Well, most Singaporeans are pretty crippled recently due to a law suit between Singapore Land Authority and Virtual Maps, thus the mapping service from www.streetdirectory.com is not available currently.

So when I was at Auckland for a firewall deployment, the customer was showing his Blackberry with an mapping application, Mgmaps or Mobile Gmaps. He’s using it with a built-in GPS and the best part is, the maps are stored in his memory card. Offline browsing !

It’s like an improved version of Google Maps for Mobile and the best feature which I love, offline cached mode ! I can leech the 17 zoom levels of Singapore from Google map and stored in my memory card. So now I have the street map of Singapore in my Sony Ericsson P1i.

Here’s a link to a very good tutorial to start using Mobile Gmaps.

To summarise the tutorial in my terms,

1. Go to http://www.mapcacher.com/ to mark out the areas you will like and generate a .map file
2. Use gMapMaker to “leech” the maps from Google
3. Install Mobile Gmaps into your mobile via http://wap.mgmaps.com
4. Load the “leeched” files into your memory card (warning: long transfer speeds, use a card reader if possible)
5. Launch Mobile Gmaps and configured the cache directory to the location where you copied your “leech” maps
6. Viola, Google map offline !

Of course, if you have an unlimited HSDPA plan, you can enjoy the online features which I haven’t tried 🙂