Last few months was the time when I’ve been travelling a lot. Nokia N900 was always with me so i’ve had some time to check few applications for travellers. Let’s have a look at CloudGPS.

CloudGPS was presented during MeeGo Conference 2010 as fast and smooth mapping tool. It was rewriten for N900 taking advantage of OpenGL ES, basing on java application. It allows exploring Open Street maps and uses GPS module to show your position. User interface is simple, few UI elements are enough to operate freely, more functions are available by keyboard shortcuts, everything is described in talk.maemo.org CloudGPS thread.

Big words are the first thing, what about reality? I’ve checked it on train, when mobile network was changing GSM cells quite frequently, so transfer wasn’t astonishing. GPS receiver was also a bit lazy in the beginning but it’s not application fault. After everything clicked in it was running very smoothly, constantly showing frame count and exact position and speed even though I was locked inside metal can of a train (viva N900 again ).

I was playing with CloudGPS for quite some time and I was really happy with it, the only thing I wasn’t amused was unavailable search option, but as I read later it’s still to be implemented in later versions. Try it, maybe you will like it too.

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MJ