I spend a lot of time traveling on unpaved roads, bush area, and sites around Southern Africa that are not on any GPS Maps that I've encountered.Whilst I know that some GPS' has a "snail trail" option to keep your route, wouldn't it be nice if a GPS Manufacturer could come up with an online update feature - i.e. upload a route, describe it's conditions - distribute it to other users.The Manufacturer would have the road co-ordinates, be able to see if several people upload the same data, compare it and cover the worlds roads more accurately without having to have their personnel drive/capture/check and double check their products accuracy.
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Look into the Dash, although its network features are more geared to the urban traveler. Some of the current generation or next generation of navigation GPS units may connect to the internet through a mobile phone, or a built in GPRS modem.
I think this is such an excellent idea. And the GPS wouldn't have to connect to the internet with wireless (which would be expensive), you could just punch a button when you're on a road that needs updated and the next time you connected it to your computer it could download it.
I live 22 miles from Garmin and know some of their engineers, yet to drive to my house, you travel on two new-ish roads (five years old) that don't show on the map of the GPS I bought last month. Everyone that drives to my house by GPS gets lost.
I know that they constantly update city maps by having the gps providing company drive down all of the roads in their search area, taking pictures of any changes. But they must not do this for all places on earth. So I agree that it would be a good idea to have an alert feature for any gps user, to let them know when they have to update their maps in rural areas, that they don't normally search.