Marketing Hype or Will you do this too?

[icefest]

yup i carry backup maps in a drybag in my pack, they are dirt cheap to print off, how many will carry a backup ipad?

Australia has little/no detailed digital topo avaliable for a reasonable price.

[photohiker]

OSM doesn't come with contour lines but you can add them using Contours Australia on Garmin. The link above is CycleMap which is OSM with SRTM and hill shading. I rate it behind Tasmaps but still pretty useful and in some cases better. Garmin topo is missing too much topo information for walkers to make their contours relevant. Possibly Garmin topo is ok for 4wd, but oztopo is usually more current and detailed.

[GPSGuided]

OSM doesn't come with contour lines but you can add them using Contours Australia on Garmin. The link above is CycleMap which is OSM with SRTM and hill shading. I rate it behind Tasmaps but still pretty useful and in some cases better. Garmin topo is missing too much topo information for walkers to make their contours relevant. Possibly Garmin topo is ok for 4wd, but oztopo is usually more current and detailed.

Yes, Contour Australia topo overlay works and is what I use too. most decently priced to get full Australian coverage. Oztopo is very good in detail but at $200, I just can't generate the justification for my applications.

[nq111]

Don't phones and ipads get their location by triangulating phone towers (not true GPS)? I would have thought heavier, less reliable and less useful than a true gps. You wouldn't get a location in many interesting parts.

Smartphones and tablets use a variety of techniques. Wireless networks is another one, and probably by far the most useful in metropolitan areas. They'll also triangulate from cell towers and most these days would also have GNSS antennas built in for GPS and/or other geolocation systems.

Antenna quality varies between devices (my original Samsung Galaxy S is dreadful) and it's sometimes very hard to obtain objective comparison info because the only selling point for most smartphones and tablets is that there's actually GPS, rather than GPS of any useful quality. I'm not sure about the iPad antenna. It's probably fine if people are using it in the field so much.

Another thing to keep in the back of your mind is that the hardware or firmware which determines what's reported by the GPS might also be optimised for use in populated areas, sometimes specifically for driving.. on the grounds that the main use 99% of people will have for a SmartPhone or Tablet GPS is to get driving directions. eg. If you're trying to record a track you're walking, the default filtering mechanism used for recording data points might be better suited to the typical speed-up-slow-down behaviour of a vehicle than for a person on foot. That issue probably wouldn't affect actual reported positions, but someone else might know better. That type of behaviour might affect stuff like a location that your device will estimate where you are, based on previous locations, if it's temporarily lost a signal.

Thanks - good to know.

I am all for technological solutions - whilst an ipad seems heavy and less capable in some regards (e.g. battery life) - I am all for this being explored.