Are there advantages to a dedicated GPS?

Dedicated GPS devices are still better than phones in offline use. Commercial maps are more compact than offline areas (on my GPS, both France and Germany are under 100MB, compared to 800+MB in case of Google offline areas) so you can fit the whole continent on the device. Plus, my GPS has a TMC receiver, so I don’t need Internet to get traffic information either.

Another important point is that GPS becomes a commodity (used ones are sold for $30 or so) so there’s less incentive to steal them. You can just leave it on your dashboard / windscreen which saves time.

I find few reasons for buying a dedicated GPS now. Indeed I know of keen ramblers who use old (i.e. cheap, used) iPhones for back-country GPS positioning, and nothing else.

Now many GPS units come with “free lifetime map updates”, but the definition of “lifetime” is hazy, and this is a new development. I recently offered to update my mother-in-law’s TomTom, only to discover it cost £30 to get new maps: I told her to use her phone.

Apple Maps / Google Maps have maps that are bang up to date, aware of traffic conditions, and are free. They are able to cache map areas for offline use. The down-side is that their mapping his heavily biased towards roads and urban use.

For driving and urban/suburban walking/cycling in your own country, I can’t find a rational reason to use a dedicated GPS over a phone.

But that doesn’t cover all situations:

Foreign Travel

If you’re travelling somewhere you don’t have data, Google Maps / Apple Maps’ offline capabilities may not be sufficient for your needs (although they’re pretty good). You have two options here:

• pay for the data you need (buy a SIM where you’re going, or rent a portable WiFi hotspot)
• use an offline app. I find Maps.Me to be an excellent, free offline maps app — it uses OpenStreetmap mapping data, covers the whole globe, and does a good job of route planning and turn-by-turn navigation

Back Country Use

If you’re in the wilderness, it’s likely that being online isn’t an option. What’s more many of the mapping applications don’t have the kind of mapping you need. OpenStreetMap has some rural trails, but it’s not an adequate substitute for a hiking map, reliably, for large parts of the world.

However there may still be an offline mapping app that suits your needs. In the UK, Ordnance Survey MapFinder allows you to buy 1:50000 or 1:25000 OS maps for the 1km squares you choose. These are the digital equivalent of the paper maps any British hiker would choose.

Note: I write this answer from the perspective of somebody who has a Garmin GPS. There are others, but from all accounts (The Wirecutter, etc.), Garmin makes the best ones. The post below might sound like I’m trying to sell somebody a GPS, but I just really love mine. I have no affiliation with Garmin.

I think there’s something to be said about the pure convenience of a dedicated GPS. If you don’t live in a high-crime area and always leave it mounted on your dashboard, it will always be there, and you will come to always use it and depend on it, even if you don’t enter a route. Would you go to the hassle of pulling out your phone, mounting it to your dashboard, plugging in the charger cable, unlocking it, and opening the maps app every single time you drive your car? I think not. You might not think this is a big deal, but it is. Usually you would only start up the maps app when you’re lost or don’t know how to get somewhere, but if the dedicated GPS is always there and on, you will use it for much more than guided navigation.

If your car has a switched power outlet (i.e. it turns off with the car), a GPS will turn on when you start the car and automatically go to the maps screen, without touching it. If your car doesn’t have a switched outlet, like mine, it is very easy to add one (pretty much anyone could do it, all it takes is plugging in a piggy-back fuse into an existing fuse slot and connecting the other wire to a metal part to ground it).

If you buy a bit of a higher-end GPS, it will come with voice control. That is, just by saying “Voice command”, you can control it hands-free. My Garmin doesn’t do so well with odd-sounding street names or locations, but for the basic stuff like “Go home”, “find pizza”, “find walmart”, etc., it works super well. I’m not sure how well Google Maps, etc. does this, but when I had my iPhone a year ago it didn’t seem to have anything like that (except Siri).

GPSs also have much larger screens than most phones, which means they can show that complicated interchange that much better.

Glancing at the screen to see the name of a cross-street or your speed and the speed limit will become second nature, and you’ll miss it when it’s not there.

There are loads of other things my GPS does that I really, really like, that most (if any) phone apps, or even GPS’s from even a couple years ago, do not do. For example:

• If I’m on the freeway and there’s a route set, it will tell me to “be in the second lane from the left”, or “be in any of the right three lanes”. This was huge for me when I first heard it. Before, it just said, “keep to the right”, without telling you that there are actually three lanes that exit and you don’t need to worry about trying to get to the far right lane in heavy traffic. Also, it will use very natural-sounding speech, like “turn right at the stop light”, or “turn right at the tee”, or “take the second left”. In my experience (last year when I had an iPhone), Google Maps isn’t this good, but maybe they’re improving it.

• “Up Ahead” is something my Garmin has. Basically, it’s a little panel that sits on the side of the screen, and it shows the distance to the next gas station, restaurant, rest stop, Tim Hortons, etc. on your route, and if you tap it, will show a list of all the matching locations. I only use this when travelling long distances, but it’s great to know that there’s a place 10 km ahead where you can stop to empty your bladder or grab food, for example.

• Predicted destinations: If I have a destination saved in my GPS and I am driving in the same general direction on the same day of the week as I last navigated to that location, my Garmin will show on the top bar “Work: 45 min, heavy traffic”, or “Church: 10 min, no traffic”. It’s great for getting a “heads-up, there might be traffic”, or even just to know how long it actually takes you. Usually, I would not actually have a route set for these locations because I know how to get there, so the voice would just be annoying.

• Driving log: My GPS draws a blue line behind you as you drive. If you’re in an unfamiliar location, this is great for recognizing where you are. For example, in 2015 I moved to a large US city from Canada, having never been there. That little blue line was critical for me learning my way about, because as soon as I saw that blue line on the screen, I knew where I was. In my experience, relying on automated voice directions means you never really learn the roads.

The one thing that dedicated GPS devices do not do is real-time, crowd-sourced traffic updates like Waze. For example, my Garmin receives traffic updates through FM radio, and if my phone is in the car and has a data connection, it will also pull traffic updates from that via Bluetooth, but in both cases, I think it will only do this at most once a minute, and only for major roads, which usually means just freeways.

In my experience, manually updating maps once a year is just fine. Roads don’t change very fast, and updating maps is dead simple. It takes a few hours to download, but once you plug it in and press Update, it does it on its own.

I will also go against Burhan here and say that a standalone GPS is more customizable. Sure, you can get funny voices on your phone, but you can do that on the GPS too. Pretty much any language is available, so that’s not an issue, and you can even change the car symbol on the screen. But more importantly, the UI is customizable. So if you don’t need to see the elevation, put something else there instead.

There’s more I could say, but I think you get the point: yes, a stand-alone, dedicated GPS is miles better than a phone GPS, but for most people, Google Maps is just fine.

@stanri brought up a good point in the comments: “my phone overheats on a hot day, sitting in the windscreen, especially if I’m driving around all day and charging it at the same time. I wouldn’t suggest that having a phone in the sun, charging, on a long drive, is a very good idea.”

Disadvantages of cell phone GPS services:

1. They rely heavily on cell phone and wifi access points for the initial fix.
2. They are only as good as the maps on them; see for instance google maps vs. apple maps.
3. It is not trivial to get other information (such as elevation) from these applications.
4. They are primarily designed for urban areas; they are very easily confused in desert or off-the-beaten-path tracking.

Advantages of cell phone GPS services:

1. They are constantly and frequently being updated thanks to the Internet.
2. They offer rich integration and multiple modes of transport; for example walk 15 minutes, take bus number 5 for 3 stops, etc.
3. You are always carrying a phone, so it is one less thing to carry with you.
4. VG is more customizable (in my Garmin unit, I can download other character voices, but that’s it); on my phone I can choose the language and speed.
5. Easily switch mapping providers; with dedicated devices you are stuck with whatever map provider the device comes with.

Advantages of dedicated GPS devices:

1. Fast, accurate lock on GPS. At least twice as fast in my anecdotal testing.
2. Battery last a lot longer.
3. Provide rich positional data (elevation, grade, etc.)
4. Exceptional when going off-road, the one in my friend’s Jeep allows him to leave a breadcrumb of markers which the GPS can follow back.
5. Some offer exceptional features (lane warnings / change direction; speed traps / cameras).
6. Navigation is not interrupted by other functions.

Disadvantages of dedicated GPS devices:

1. Map updates are not that frequent
2. You are stuck with the map provider which is licensed with your device. In other words, you are stuck with whatever level of detail / coverage your map maker has.
3. Another device, another charger to carry.
4. Easy targets for theft.
5. Are only good at one thing – difficult to use the same device for car and then walking navigation, or to get directions using ferries, etc.

My GPS works fine when I’m off the cell net. Around here that means highways other than the interstates. Every national park I have visited has at best been marginal for cell service, generally no service at all.

Let’s look at the Wirecutter because it’s widely considered as a reliable site for reviews — and we won’t even rely on it too much. To quote, the best standalone GPS can (I edited out specific company and model because we are not here to advertise and it’s not relevant to the question):

In addition to being easy to use, the [model] includes free lifetime map updates and traffic alerts, and—like all the models in [company]’s new [..] series—a new suite of safety-oriented driver alerts. These alerts include, but aren’t limited to, warnings about upcoming sharp curves, speed-limit changes, railroad and animal crossings, school zones, and red-light and speed cameras. They even tell you if you’re going the wrong way on a one-way street. We also like that the […] units can double as a display for an optional wireless backup camera or rear-seat baby cam.

While surely a smartphone could do these I am absolutely unaware of any actually doing any of these (sharp curve warning? Rear seat baby cam?) much less all of them.