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Originally Posted by j.p.s
Thanks. You might have saved me $200. (Except for that Navfree tidbit below.)
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If it's just offline maps and navigation that you're interested in, you might like the Here Maps and Here Drive apps offered on Microsoft Windows Phones, with their free downloadable maps (I've loaded several U.S. states and a European country).
My Windows phone is a low-end Nokia Lumia 520, which I had bought for $40 on sale, and just use as a media player and occasional GPS device. But if I were buying now, I would get the slightly updated Microsoft Lumia 635, when it goes on sale again for $40 like it was on Black Friday, because it has a 4.5" screen compared to the 520's 4.0" screen.
But there's a trick to downloading the maps. Because these cheap phones only have 8 GB of internal storage, which is not enough to load many maps once you add a few common apps, you have to load the maps to the SD card, which is not possible out of the box. The trick is that you have to
follow these instructions, which include getting a special app for allowing maps to be loaded onto an inserted micro SD card.
What's special about this trick is that the needed app, "Lumia Storage Check," is not found via searching the Windows Phone Store, but rather is sent as a link in an e-mail. Hey, it's Windows Phone!
The navigation app behaves a bit differently from my stand-alone GPS and Google Maps, but once I got used to it, it's completely adequate.
A caveat: My experience is as a U.S. resident. I don't know whether the instructions linked above will work outside the U.S., nor whether you'll be able to freely load maps from any country as I did.