[ashtonkem]

You don’t have to be particularly intense to find value in a full fledged GPS. We just do a lot of day hikes and a few overnighters, and the 64st ($300-400) has been immensely valuable. Considering that the inreach eliminates the need for a separate rescue beacon, that’s a cost and weight savings. If you’re even more marginally intense than I, one of these is less a toy and more a life saving necessity.

Dedicated GPS units are faster, more reliable, and easier to keep going in the field than your phone. You’ll never have them display a blank square because you lost LTE and it didn’t buffer that map segment. A lot of them will also record your hikes for overlay onto Google Earth later, which is nice. I personally have a large number of the local hot springs recorded into mine, which is very important when they’re off road and off trail.

[progman32]

Not saying dedicated units are not useful, but there are local-only mapping applications for smartphones, too. OsmAnd is a good example, it uses OpenStreetMap data which can be downloaded to local storage (by region). It supports local-only driving/walking/transit directions, too.

[ashtonkem]

I’ve generally found the GPS only resolution of my phone to be greatly inferior to my Garmin. In cities cell phones depend heavily on cell towers to boost GPS resolution. Out in the back woods this difference becomes more stark.

I can also keep a GPS running longer with less power. My 64st will last an entire day on two NiMH batteries, and it takes less available power to charge. Cell phones do a lot more, but that “more” comes at a cost of energy consumption.

[Scoundreller]

It’s too bad google offline maps only supports driving directions.

[int_19h]

For hiking specifically, OsmAnd is what you'd want anyway:

https://osmand.net/

You can download as many offline maps as you want (the entire US can fit quite easily on modern phones), you get offline pathfinding, and offline maps have elevation contour lines and hill shading. The maps themselves are also much more detailed compared to Google or Apple when it comes to hiking trails.

[ashtonkem]

Most of these smart phone apps are pretty bad at providing even driving directions in the back country. Plenty of times I’ve had either Apple or Google fail to recognize a forest service road, which I presume is in a freely available file somewhere, and tell me to park and walk miles to the trailhead. I’ve learned the hard lesson to have a backup plan just for navigating to the trailhead, let alone once I’m on the trail.

[ghaff]

This gets back to whether the road in question is something you should direct the average smartphone user down given that they'll probably blindly follow the instructions. In many cases, the answer is no. If they know (or tink they know what they're doing), they can make their own decisions.

I'd actually much rather a smartphone routing algorithm err on the side of caution in this regard.

[ashtonkem]

That’s a really good point that I’ve never thought about. Some of the roads I’ve driven on were very much in the “you know what your ground clearance is, right?” category. It’s probably for the best that Apple and google don’t blindly send people that way.