ViewRanger – topographical maps for mobile phones

Using your phone’s built-in GPS receiver can make urban navigation a breeze, assuming you have an up to date street map loaded onto the handset, or can access something like Google Maps for Mobile.

Step off the beaten track, though, and you might run into some trouble,  Most of the maps you are likely to use on your mobile just show streets, landmarks and a boundaries – great for plotting a route to a different city or even down to the shops and back, but not for going off-road.

ViewRanger has announced an expansion to its range of topographical map packs for use on Symbian S60 handsets.

The range now covers Finland, Slovenia and the UK, with five more European countries coming soon.

UK Data is the most comprehensive, with Ordnance Survey map data being used to provide 1:25,000 and 1:50,000 scale maps of the entire country, together with detailed maps of UK national parks.

The viewer app is free to download and works with both S60 2nd and 3rd edition devices, supporting both built-in and external GPS receivers.

Maps cost anything from £20 for a small region of the UK to around £149 for the entire country on DVD.

The software also has a ‘Buddy Beacon’ feature that lets you plot the location of your friends (assuming they are running the software too) which should make it a bit easier to find them if they wander off across the moors.

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