Need Walking Mode GPS for Istanbul

[Jaypas]

Hello,
I'm travelling to Istanbul in July. I need a gps which will help me navigate while I'm walking the streets in Istanbul and other parts of Turkey. Can you recommend a TomTom gps that can do this? I will also need the map of Turkey, is this a product which I can buy from Tomtom?
Thanks,
Jay

 

[canderson]

If you plan to spend more than a couple of hours in Istanbul, you'll find that you will run out battery long before you run out of Istanbul. Also, you'll want to take careful stock of their tram system there to avoid burning through a lot of shoes.

Honestly - cannot really recommend a TomTom for this. In your shoes, I would sooner consider a Garmin Oregon 450 or Montana 600 hand held unit (great sale prices keep coming up on the former) with Open Street Maps (free here http://garmin.na1400.info/routable.php) loaded.

Why? Battery life. Whereas these automotive units (from TomTom, Garmin or anyone else) are great in a vehicle where you've got constant power, they last only a couple of hours when unconnected. A hand held like the 450 will run 8 hours or more on a decent pair of AA cells, and these can be readily removed and replaced or recharged as needed. I've recommended USB "power extenders" for some people using TomTom under special circumstances, but this isn't going to be the best solution for extended walking time. Automotive units also don't fit well in your hand, aren't waterproof, and tend to be dropped.

If you have places you specifically wish to travel, you will want to locate them in advance and add them as waypoints. Example: Topkapi Palace covers a lot of acreage. Best to identify the location of the entrance so you can go there and not just wander the perimeter trying to find a way in (it's at N41 00.511, E28 58.882).

If you need assistance with this sort of thing, I can provide a lot of additional help.

 

[Jaypas]

Hi, Canderson,
Yeah, I never considered the short battery life of the TomTom when it is out of the car. The Garmin Oregon 450 is quite expensive ($365). If I decide to buy the Garmin, are there any extra things I have to buy, like map products? I can get the maps for free from Garmin, right?
Thanks,
Jaypas.

 

[dhn]

For questions pertaining to Garmin products, I'd suggest registering and posing your questions here:
http://forums.gpsreview.net/

Many Garmin experts there prepared to assist.........

 

[canderson]

Hi, Canderson,
Yeah, I never considered the short battery life of the TomTom when it is out of the car. The Garmin Oregon 450 is quite expensive ($365). If I decide to buy the Garmin, are there any extra things I have to buy, like map products? I can get the maps for free from Garmin, right?
Thanks,
Jaypas.

You can do much better than $365 for an Oregon 450. Around Christmas, they were going for less than $250. No, you don't get the map products for free from Garmin. In fact, when used only for a brief time it starts to look quite expensive, just as it does with TomTom when you're only going to need a map for a week or two. That's why I pointed to this no-cost source for street maps that will be used only occasionally: http://garmin.na1400.info/routable.php Maps downloaded there will work on most Garmin units.

 

[- et -]

Walking map for Istanbul

I'm travelling to Istanbul in July. I need a gps which will help me navigate while I'm walking the streets in Istanbul and other parts of Turkey. Can you recommend a TomTom gps that can do this? I will also need the map of Turkey, is this a product which I can buy from Tomtom?

As has already been mentioned, an automotive GPS is probably not a good choice for this application, given the limited battery life. Based upon your description above of your intended purpose (walking) I have a suggestion that might be free if you have an Android phone. If you charge your phone in the hotel each night, you should get enough life to meet your needs, although I would carry a spare battery as a precaution. (Fortunately, changing the battery of most cell phones is relatively easy, and a spare battery will be small and light.)

On Android phones, Google Maps will allow you to call up a map of almost any place for which street maps exist. If you do that while actually in Istanbul you will have to worry about roaming charges and also about cell-phone reception. However, one of the relatively unknown capabilities of the Android Google Maps is that you can pre-cache a map on your phone of a ten-mile radius around a location you choose.

When you are actually on the scene, you can zoom in on the area where your phone's GPS says you are located. It will not give you turn directions, traffic, or the other bells and whistles of a full-blown GPS, but it appears to me that it should be adequate for a walking tour. (I just tried this for Istanbul on my own phone and it looks like it may do what you want.)

One concern I would have is whether the GPS in your Android phone will pick up an adequate signal in the narrow streets that are found in old cities all over the world. As a confirmed paranoid pessimist, I would get a quality stand-alone GPS receiver that can be plugged into my phone to supply a much better signal to the phone.

I know that such units exist for interfacing to a laptop or netbook, as I have done that to navigate with Microsoft Streets and Trips on a laptop. I assume that they now do for cell phones, although I have not actually researched that to confirm it. Based upon the units available for interfacing to a laptop / netbook, I assume that the cost of a quality GPS receiver for use with an Android phone would be in the range of $30 - $100.

With best wishes,
- Tom -

 

[Jaypas]

Hi, Canderson,
Regarding what you said: "That's why I pointed to this no-cost source for street maps that will be used only occasionally: http://garmin.na1400.info/routable.php Maps downloaded there will work on most Garmin units."

Are these no-cost maps accurate? I am really horrible at navigating, always getting lost, and I need a tool that will help me navigate the street while I'm in Turkey. Will these no-cost maps work on the Oregon 450? I wish there was a way to test it for accuracy before my trip. Maybe I can get a map of Washington DC (close to where I live) and test it for accuracy in DC.

Thanks,
Jaypas

 

[canderson]

Yes, they really are decent maps - and I can personally vouch for those in Istanbul and a couple of nearby larger cities having used them recently. How complete they may be in the hinterlands of Turkey on the Asian side, I can't say for certain. Then again, we're talking about some places where the word 'road' might not even be entirely accurate <g>.

Yes, those maps work fine on the Oregon 450. After receiving one (you select your desired 'chunk' and you'll get an email telling you to come and download it. You want the *.img file), rename it to something you can recall (like WashingtonDC.img) and just stick it in the Garmin directory of your 450. This unit will also hold large uSD cards if you want to get completely crazy loading up maps. It's amazing how little space these vector maps use, though.

If you ever have need for USA topo maps, those are available from another source.

 

[Jaypas]

Thanks, Canderson. You've been a tremendous help.

 

[Jaypas]

Hi, Tom,
Thanks for the response. Do you have any ideas on how I can use my iphone? I wish I could use google maps in Istanbul. But I have to disable roaming because it would be too expensive. I was wondering, will the gps on my iphone work if roaming is disabled? Also, I was wondering if it is possible to buy and download the map of Turkey into my iphone?
Thanks,
jaypas

 

[- et -]

Thanks for the response. Do you have any ideas on how I can use my iphone? I wish I could use google maps in Istanbul. But I have to disable roaming because it would be too expensive. I was wondering, will the gps on my iphone work if roaming is disabled? Also, I was wondering if it is possible to buy and download the map of Turkey into my iphone?

I do not have an iPhone, so my comments will be based upon a combination of what I have been able to find on the web about iPhones, and an assumption that products such as Google Maps - that apparently do also work on the iPhone - will work there in a similar fashion to how they work on Android phones.

As I said previously, before you leave home you can have Google maps download and cache maps of a ten-mile radius around locations of your choice anywhere in the world for which Google has maps. You will not need to incur a roaming charge while in Instanbul or other cities in Turkey. Keep in mind that these maps will be functionally like having a paper map - even with a GPS telling you where you are, you will not get turn instructions, traffic reports, etc. To see how this concept might (or might not) work, I suggest that you do such a download and cache in your local area and experiment. If it looks promising locally, you can investigate further, and if it is a flop you can just drop it.

My Android phone has an internal GPS receiver for a more accurate supplement to the cruder fixes that can be obtained by cell-tower triangulation. I assume that the iPhone does also. I have not found any information that tells me whether or not the iPhone GPS will work in the absence of cell-phone reception, but I would consider that a desirable feature and hope that Apple would also.

As I said previously, older cities often have narrow streets, and I question whether the receivers in cell phones would work reliably there. If I were to pursue this approach, I would invest in a quality GPS signal receiver with Bluetooth capability. From some web research I have confirmed that several companies make such units at prices in the $60-$70 range, and that software exists for the iPhone that will let the iPhone receive data via Bluetooth and use that data as if it came from the iPhone itself.

I hope this is of some help.

With best wishes,
- Tom -

 

[faw13]

if i were you, (since i live in istanbul for the last 19 years , i guess i can help ) when you come here, go to a AVEA store (cheapest gsm operator here) buy yourself a prepaid data line, 1gb should be enough, which will cost you about 15 euros (or about 35 Turkish Liras) 20 euros for Turkcell (best operator) that you can use for 1 month, then you can cancel the line when you are leaving Turkey, or do nothing, it will cancel itself automatically after 1 year of no use or if you can find one of those chinese gps devices, which can run anything that runs on wince 5 or 6, you can use igo software, which has the best pois and map coverage for Turkey, esp. istanbul and has a pretty good walking mode, as i have seen

tomtom is not the device for this, high quality device but batt lasts less than 2 hours, and as canderson mentioned, this city is huge takes about 1+ hours to go from 1 place to another generally (1.5 hours from home to school for me with public transport, 3.5 with car during rushhour)

google maps will do just fine, garmin and tomtom dont have the perfect coverage for here, igo is the best along with g-maps if you plan to buy a device