After we got married (!) last month Melissa and I spent 10 days in Europe on our honeymoon. London, Paris, and Rome! It was an amazing trip, especially since neither of us had been to Europe at all before. But this post isn’t going to be our amazing trip’s slideshow. On the more technical side of things, I was fascinated at the idea of using our smartphones (we both have a Motorola Droid on Verizon) in Europe.
A little background: not all US cell phones work in Europe. I’ll avoid the nitpicky details and just say that in general AT&T or T-Mobile phones will work in Europe, but Verizon and other carriers won’t. While we could still open and use apps on our phones, anything that required a cell network connection would be dead.
This distressed my inner techie – I’ve become hopelessly addicted to navigating with my phone’s google maps, and google maps pulls the maps over a cell connection. I really wanted to use it to find our way around. The one thing that still worked on the Droid in Europe is the GPS – it can get your position in latitude/longitude. But with no data connection It has no maps to plot that point on! All that Google Maps would show me is a blue dot on a grey background. Not exactly handy for finding my way.
But with a little foresight and pre-planning, I set up my Droid to cache the maps locally before we left for Europe. This process was a bit of a pain, because it’s not well documented anywhere that I could find. Here’s a tutorial: Continue reading