Garmap Update and new update policy

[+GlobalRat]

For those of you that have been sleeping, Garmap released Southern Africa Streetmaps v1 last week. This is the update for Garmap South Africa Streetmaps v4.

 

From the name, you’ll see that it now includes a bit more than South Africa. It includes Lesotho, Swaziland, Namibia, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, bits of Malawi. The new complete set is 80.1MB. The neighbouring countries are restricted to main roads, and detail roads of major towns. I’m sure these will expand with subsequent releases.

 

According to the blurb they have also redone most of Cape Town and have added a shed load of POI’s. They’ve also made a distinction between dirt and tarred roads to aide better autorouting.

 

You can check the detail blurb on Garmap’s website..

 

I’ve just loaded it up and must say it looks quite neat. Only time will tell if certain errors have been fixed, but must say the maps have a nice new crisp look. Will not help much if you don’t have a colour GPSr I guess.

 

What is more exciting is the future upgrade policy that Garmap will be following. There will be two releases per year. A free one in June and then a more major upgrade in Novemeber which will cost a minimal fee. For this release, if you have v4, the upgrade now costs R228 for the unlock key, and R39.90 for the disk. Earlier versions incur a R741 fee for the unlock key.

 

I think Garmap are started to take note of the increase demand in the market and certainly the ongoing affordability of keeping software up to date. In my mind this is a great step in the right direction. There is going to be a huge shift in GPS usage in the next couple of years. I’m sure you have all noticed the Garmin ads and suddenly every second car has the telltale suction cup on their windscreen.

 

As a community that uses this software intensively, I urge you to keep communicating on this forum and Garmap’s forum on issues that you encounter with map products. The more input they receive from users, the better the future products will be. The chaps there have certainly been most helpful and attentive to issues I have raised with them.

[+Team_Farmers]

I’m sure you have all noticed the Garmin ads and suddenly every second car has the telltale suction cup on their windscreen.

 

... some of those suction cups belong to radar jammers for speed cameras or is that because we live in the east rand?

Edited November 9, 2006 by Team_Farmers