advantage of gps over phone
- Thread starter jklingel
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Good question, and it comes up a lot. Phones have become genuinely capable navigation tools, but dedicated GPS units still hold some real advantages depending on how you travel.
Reliability and battery life are the big ones. A dedicated GPS draws very little power compared to running navigation on a phone with the screen on, and it does not compete with calls, messages, or other apps. On a long road trip this matters. A GPS unit also keeps working if your phone runs flat or loses signal.
Signal and offline use are worth considering too. Dedicated GPS units store full maps on the device and never need a data connection. Phones can do this with the right app (Google Maps offline, Sygic, OsmAnd, and others all allow downloaded maps), but many people rely on live data without realizing it, which can leave them stuck in areas with poor cell coverage - and there is plenty of that across rural USA.
Durability and mounting are practical points. A GPS unit is purpose-built to sit on a windshield or dash mount in heat and vibration, has a screen designed for direct sunlight, and you are not tying up your phone while driving.
That said, if you are sticking mainly to well-covered urban and interstate routes, a phone with downloaded maps and a good mount is perfectly capable for most travelers. The gap has narrowed considerably. Where dedicated GPS still earns its place is long rural drives, areas with spotty coverage, or if you simply want a device dedicated to the job so your phone stays free.
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One other advantage, if you're into it, is that with tools like Garmin Base Camp, you can pre-plan a route, multiple routes, or a complete trip on your computer ahead of time and save these to the GPS unit which will then follow your plans, giving you more granular control over your travels. I'm not aware of phone GPS having this capability.
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Great point, Steve. BaseCamp is a powerful tool and it is hard to overstate how much control it gives you over route planning before you ever leave the driveway. Being able to sit at a full-size screen, drag routes around, add shaping points, organize waypoints into folders, and then push the whole thing to the device is a real workflow advantage over anything currently available on phones.
To add to what you said, BaseCamp also lets you manage and preview your maps, review track logs from previous trips, and create custom POIs. For someone planning a complex multi-day trip with specific roads they want to hit, it is a genuinely different level of control compared to the in-app planning tools you get with Google Maps or Waze.
There are some phone-side tools worth mentioning for completeness. Kurviger and Scenic (popular with motorcyclists) do offer desktop-style route planning with GPX import/export, and Google Maps lets you add multiple stops. But they still do not match the depth of the BaseCamp plus Garmin device combination, particularly when it comes to managing large numbers of waypoints or working with detailed topographic or specialty maps.
For a motorcoach driver especially, the ability to load a carefully vetted route and trust that the device will follow it exactly, without the app deciding to "helpfully" reroute you, is a meaningful practical advantage.
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Absolutely! I retired from my "real" job as a Product Engineer 18 years ago and have been driving tour motor coach cross country ever since as a part-time retirement gig. I have driven 500k miles, and my BaseCamp database currently has 2911 custom POI's, and 2644 routes I have created and saved. And that's only half, I have archived the first 9 years of routes. I really don't know what I would have done without my Garmins, I certainly couldn't have done that with a phone. With the planning I do, I frequently have customers express amazement that even in a place I've never been to, I seem to know my way around as if I'd lived there.
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Steve, those numbers are genuinely impressive - 500k miles and nearly 2,700 active routes is a database built from real experience that no app could replicate. That kind of accumulated, organised knowledge is an asset in its own right, and it perfectly illustrates something worth highlighting for jklingel: a dedicated GPS with BaseCamp is not just a navigation tool, it becomes a professional-grade record of everywhere you have been and every route you have refined over time.
The point about not being able to replicate that on a phone is well made. Even if a phone app could technically store waypoints and routes, the lack of a proper desktop companion means there is no practical workflow for building and managing a library at that scale. You would be fighting the tool rather than using it.
Out of curiosity, with a database that large, do you tend to work with archived routes as reference material when planning a return trip to a destination, or do you generally build fresh each time based on current conditions?
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Good question. I don't do line runs (scheduled, same route repeated) so every trip is unique, all private charters. But there are quite a few that are similar. In these cases I always reference earlier routes planned and saved at least for info/reminder, and sometimes duplicate a saved route to use either as is, or, more commonly, as the starting point for minor adjustments depending on changing construction, variations in intermediate stops or destination details, etc. I have kept in the active database all the POI's I have created over 18 years, so it's quite convenient to re-use those as needed even in new routes. Many of my POI's would be considered duplicates of POI's that are in the mapping, but the locations of the generic Garmin-established POI's seldom match the exact spot that is best for passenger dropoff or pickup, so I typically create a POI on top of the mapped POI then move it to the specific spot, say at the curb in front of the venue or something like that. I even copy the POI coordinates into Google Maps to verify the specific location in the satellite view, and frequently copy spot coordinates from GM back into the waypoint properties to lock in the correct specific location. It's been a fun and interesting challenge developing the best strategies for using the GPS optimally in my business.