I can’t stand GPS devices and refuse to use them in general, why? Well, my reasoning is pretty simple. If you have lived in Sydney more than a couple of years, you should be competent enough to know what main roads connect to the major suburbs and have a general sense of direction.

If you don’t, you should be on public transport in order to free up the roads a bit and prevent possible accidents whilst you are staring at your GPS device, and believe me I’ve seen more than a few clueless drivers gazing at their GPS.

In saying this, I actually downloaded xGPS → for my iPhone over the weekend as I was going to pick up something in a suburb I don’t usually travel to and it was a significant traveling distance. xGPS is a GPS application that feeds off Google Maps → and quite well at that. Best of all, it’s free from the Cydia application repository if you have a Jailbroken iPhone.

The set up of the application was quite easy indeed, I think it took a total of 2-3 minutes. There are also lots of other settings you can adjust, for example: automatic map rotation, adjustment of route if you’re going the wrong way, night mode, prevent iPhone sleep mode and many more.

Best of all, I found out that the developers of xGPS also have a desktop application → available for both Windows and Mac which allows you to download areas of maps that you select from Google Maps and sync them to your phone, this is great as it saves you a few Mb (I downloaded a total of 143Mb which covers all of Sydney in high detail).

Issues? For one, some streets weren’t accessible as indicated on Google Maps (left or right turns that were blocked off by median strips) and the voice directions aren’t loud enough, hopefully this will be adjusted with future versions. The desktop client also has a few issues with downloading large maps from Google.