Originally Posted By: Dignan
I don't need it to load satellite views, but why couldn't it load all the roads in the general direction you'll be going? Or even pre-load just the roads on your route (it might already do that, I don't know). Why couldn't they do that? Would it be so difficult? It's Google, I think they have some smart people there who could figure an algorithm to decide what data to load before you set out.

Because that's not how Google Maps works. The client is used for rendering and that's about it.

Quote:
Its GPS capability only goes so far as to report a location.

I'm not sure what you thought I was saying. Did you think I thought it should load data over GPS? These phones, unlike a nav-only device, have almost-constant data connections, so in fact I'd expect them to be even better at their jobs.[/quote]

Sorry, I meant that Google Maps doesn't have navigation built-in like a Garmin or TomTom product would. It simply reads the location from GPS and sends that to Google. A Garmin device reads the location from GPS and then does work internally.