EasyMap is the maps application by Mojos Studios, the same folks behind the first ever Twitter client Twittix for Symbian-powered handsets. During an interview with founder of Mojos Studios, Boris Raczynski said that their intention was to provide customers with high quality applications. So does EasyMap live up to the expectation of what a high quality application is?
The application can be installed to the memory of your choice, that is phone memory, mass storage or memory card. At launch you’ll get a prompt about that the application will make use of phone functions such as connecting to the internet, use GPS and so forth, with their support email if you should be worried about what the application does. This notice will luckily not bother you anymore in the future. The second notification will prompt you about connecting to the internet and if you allow it you get to select the internet access point to use.
Once connected the application will show up map info on the main screen where the left softkey is used for options and the right softkey to exit the application. How fast map elements shows up depends on your connection speed as well as how detailed the maps are.
A handy red ring indicates your location and by using the gps on your phone it will provide more accurate positioning.
To navigate the map you use the D-pad, simple as that. A nice detail is that it will move continuously in a direction once you have pressed it. For instance if you press right on the D-pad it will keep moving right until you press left once in which it then will stop. It’s a bit weird and an annoyance in the beginning but just after a couple of seconds you’ll realize how useful this is.
Options brings up a menu where you can change maps with the shortcut in parenthesis. Here you can switch between Mapnik, Osmarender and Cycle Map.
Show satellite shows up a nice screen with where the satellites are and bar graph shows the signal from the different satellites.
Memory details shows up how many tiles are stored on your phone, the ram usage and memory usage for map data.
Most of the options in settings are quite obvious such as turning off the connection notification and set a default access point. When roaming you can set the application to show a warning, not connect or “as home network”, the latter in my opinion is just a fancy work for connect.
Here you can also set the maximum map storage space which is indicated by some number defaulting to 300 without further explanation. Luckily as seen on the memory details it said 300MB in which we can assume is the measurement here as well.
Tile reload time can be set to “use info from server”, one hour, day or week and never. Just think of it as a cache or how frequent map data are exchanged for newer map data.
There is no way to select any form of navigation and you can’t search for an address or set where you want to start from and go to. If you are looking for an application you can use for car or pedestrian navigation you have looked for the wrong one.
The different map modes provides different details and each have it’s own uses. Mapnik is overall OK to use, while Osmarender provides richer details and the last one Cycle Map can mostly only be used to look up dedicated cycle roads.
The overall speed of the application seems to be slower and when zooming out in an area the details are not very rich and I would even compare it to just a bit faster than the previous reviewed Map 24 Mobile which even supports navigation and is free.
Without the ability to do navigation the price at $13.99 is a bit pricey and counterparts such as Google Maps and OVI Maps provides better choices. It’s good to see other developers come up with map applications but in the end EasyMap is not that mojo after all.
