Golayitdown
Veteran
maps offline lets you download a whole city i.e NY,LONDON.LA
Go Offline with Google Maps for Android - YouTube
That looks good and I hope it works that well, but I trust the hands on reviews until i can try it myself
The Verge said:Google Maps has also received a robust update that's available to Ice Cream Sandwich and Gingerbread users: a "Make available offline" feature. You enable it with a menu selection and then pan the map view out to choose your offline zone, but it can only save up to 80MB or so per zone. You can set up multiple offline areas, however, under the "My Places" section of the app. For what it's worth, I had no problem saving overlapping zones, but that's obviously an inelegant solution.
Engadget said:Google promised us earlier this month that its offline mapping solution would be coming soon -- just in time for Apple to debut its own mapping solution for iOS 6. Right in line with Jelly Bean's launch, offline Maps is now a reality for Android smartphones. It's exactly what you probably assume it is: the same Maps you know and love, but with the ability to navigate sans a live data connection. The concept here is far from new; even in early 2010, a Nokia device was pulling top honors in our smartphone GPS shootout thanks to its ability to operate offline. Fast forward a few years, and the Lumia's Nokia Drive app still remains a phenomenal option due to -- you guessed it -- offline support. It's actually kind of startling that it has taken Google this long to join the party, and now that it has, we're left with mixed feelings. Google Maps in Android 4.1 (Jelly Bean)
On one hand, Maps is still beautifully designed, robust and magically woven into the fabric of Navigation. For the avid traveler, it's indispensable, and the addition of offline just makes an already world-class product that much more amazing. Maps ties in easily with searches for nearby eateries and businesses, and there's a wonderful amount of integration between searches and favorites on Maps for Android and Maps in the browser. The good news here is that offline Maps doesn't feel like a new product. It's still Maps, and it still works well. If you've downloaded a certain section of town and you're routing through it, it won't matter if you lose signal, dip into a tunnel or head underground for a bit -- at least, not any more than a conventional PND from TomTom or Garmin would. So long as you have GPS and downloaded maps, you're golden.
Therein lies the problem. The actual process of getting an offline map is entirely too tedious, and thoroughly confusing in practice. Allow us to explain. When zoomed in around our test location in San Francisco, a tap into the Settings allowed us to select "Make Available Offline." Smooth sailing so far. But from here, you're presented with a situation that's just not ... ideal. You're asked to zoom in or out to select an ambiguous section of map that you'd like to download. How exactly are you supposed to know the precise road that you won't need to know about? How does Google expect its users to have that kind of knowledge if they're pre-downloading maps to a place that they'll soon travel to for the first time? And more importantly, why should Maps users need to know this?
In our testing, we found it possible to download around 80MB of maps before running into a "This section is too large to download" error, which makes itself known even when connected to WiFi. If you get this pop-up, you'll have to zoom in tighter and download a smaller section. For reference, 80MB will only get you the roadways from San Francisco to Daly City (give or take a few miles). Pardon our terseness, but what a joke.
Compare this to the offline downloading situation in Nokia Drive. There, you go into a "Manage Maps" section, connect to WiFi and then select an entire country to download -- or, if you aren't feeling the entire 50 states here in the USA, you can download each state individually. For reference, the entire USA takes up 1.8GB of space on the Lumia 900. Why isn't a similar option available from Google? As it stands, Google's implementation is practically useless for spontaneous road-trippers who aren't keen on spending a few hours zooming and downloading (and rinsing and repeating) in hopes of covering entire states that they'll be traversing. It really feels as if Google engineered this for urban dwellers who only intend to download maps for one city at a time. For those looking to download all of Montana in order to be prepared for those monumental coverage holes... well, you're still better off with Nokia Drive