The application contains everything necessary tools for comfortable road navigation - route planning for pedestrians and drivers, voice alerts, recommendations for changing lanes in advance, trip computer and others. The open technology cartographic solution OpenStreetMaps is used as a base, which includes detailed plan both large cities and open areas.

Main characteristics:

  • 3D navigation based on OSM;
  • voice mode;
  • speed limit and traffic camera alerts;
  • determining the location from a photograph;
  • recommendations for rebuilding.

Principle of operation:

Before the first launch, the Be On Road navigator will ask you to select a storage and location - maps must first be downloaded to disk. Then you will be offered a choice of one of two modes - Free and Premium. In the first case, a free navigation mode is available (including in 3D), in the second - all the main functions. By the way, the developers offer new users to try all the features for seven days without additional expenses.

The main menu is called up by clicking on the icon in the form of three horizontal stripes in the lower right corner of the screen. The basic functionality is located behind the “Main” icon, but the most interesting thing opens by tapping on the “Premium” icon - here you can set photolocation parameters, view trip computer data and the location of speed cameras.

Pros:

  • large database of open objects;
  • displaying the planned end time of a given route;
  • interface in Russian;
  • offline access without restrictions.

Minuses:

  • voice notifications only in the Premium version;
  • there is no traffic control system;
  • There is no way to use it online without downloading maps.

Like most navigators, Bee On Road has the most interesting features not available for free. On the other hand, the cost of the license is relatively affordable (from 600 rubles), and the functionality of the hero of our review allows it to be used as the only navigation program.

Analogues:

  • Route 66 - advanced navigation software based on commercial maps;
  • Yandex.Navigator - free product for online use.

GPS Navigationmobile app with maps from the developer Maps&GPS Navigation. Lost? Download the program and learn a lot about your favorite places.

How many times has every person faced the problem of navigating a little-known area? Tons of free similar apps require permanent connection with the Internet and downloading gigabytes of information. But what to do if you get lost in an unknown location, and even without the ability to connect to the Internet? To avoid such incidents, download the GPS Navigation program for Android and always be informed.

All maps are available offline. Particularly suitable for users living in remote or little-known countries, for which there is little geographical detail in such applications. The developers have tried to combine all geolocation services in the application, which increases the accuracy and number of geographical objects on the map. In addition to the mapping function, the program provides GPS navigation capabilities for both pedestrians and motorists. Speed ​​control zones, road cameras, traffic lights and much more will help drivers on their journey. It is possible to plot a route using geolocation algorithms.

The program itself will determine the shortest path and inform you about adjustments in movement using voice assistant. The interface is intuitive, control is carried out both tactilely and using voice commands in a variety of languages. Both 3D mode and 2D HUD are available for activation. Also, to make searching easier, photographs taken by users and tourists are attached to each famous place. So you can visually determine the required location. GPS navigation, map updates, offline work are provided free of charge, which makes the program gold among many similar clones. Download the app, pack your backpack and go on a journey to explore new horizons!

Features of GPS Navigation on Android:

  • offline maps;
  • constant updates;
  • GPS navigation;
  • several projection modes;
  • photographs of localities;
  • voice commands in several languages.

Download GPS Navigation for Android for free by clicking on the link below.

Previous articles in this series:
Google Maps (7.7.0): review of navigation software for Android
Waze 3.7: Wikiroad navigation for Android
Comparison of 5 popular navigation apps for Android

general information

Be-on-road is one of the few navigation apps with free downloadable maps. It was originally developed by the Czech company Aponia Software, which was far from new to this market. The company began its activities in the mid-2000s at the peak of the growing popularity of electronic mobile mapping and navigation. In Russia, Be-on-road once appeared in Mio navigators, where it replaced iGo products, offering faster map updates and work with traffic information.

In 2014, the application came under the wing of another company - Bzing s.r.o. At the same time, Aponia still has a clone, which received a new name and is formally distanced from its rejected brother by the support of paid Navteq maps. Users who would like to continue working with paid maps, including updating them, were asked to download the new Aponia application, and the outgoing Be-on-road limited itself to supporting exclusively free OSM maps, which at that time could be counted on one hand. However, their number began to grow rapidly, and within just a few months there were several dozen cards available.

Pricing and licensing policy

With the change of “owner”, the earning model also changed - now the application will offer users a package of additional paid functions, while navigation will remain free, including all cartography. The cost of the package for Russia is 600 rubles. It includes the function of projecting an image onto Windshield, speed warnings, display mobile cameras speed control, lane guidance system, more frequent map updates and personal technical support.

System requirements

There are no special requirements for the system. The application is ready to work even with old Android versions 2.1, but you need to remember that the cards will require a lot of space. On the other hand, the application offers the user a choice of storage location for cards, including the one installed in the system external card memory.

Functionality

The main functions of the Be-on-road 3.10.1.42 application are reflected in our traditional table:

Be-on-road 3.10.1.42
Interface
Manual map zoom during navigationYes
Battery/satellite/GSM indicatorsOS status line
Changing the map orientationYes
Manual map rotationNo
Mileage informationNo
Satellite View ScreenYes
3D modeformally
Map tiltYes
Quick Access ToolbarNo
"Trip computer"No
Night modeYes
Augmented RealityNo
Search
Universal (online)formally
AddressYes
By coordinatesYes
POI around / at the point / at the finishYes Yes Yes
Voice inputNo
Working with routes
Save / load / forwardyes / yes / no
Simulation of driving along the routeYes
Full displayYes
Working with tracksYes
Operating modes: passenger car / cargo / pedestrian / public transport / helicopteryes / no / yes / yes / yes
Cards
Map updateYes
SourceO.S.M.
Installing third party cardsNo
Number of available country and region maps281
Volume of maps of Russia744 MB
Online services
Traffic displayNo
Dynamic POIsNo
Friends on the mapconditionally
Thematic news feedsNo
Photo on the mapNo
Overview photos of streets (Streetview)No
WeatherNo
Ban on Internet accessNo

* the function is activated if the starting point of the route differs from the current position according to the GPS receiver.

Interface

The working screen is extremely laconic. In addition to the map and arrow displaying your location, there is an information panel at the bottom, where you can choose from three parameters regarding the route and movement along it, or data from a GPS receiver, such as speed and altitude. When you touch the screen, a menu appears on the right with zoom buttons and display settings, and on the left is an icon to open a pop-up menu of actions.


The map itself is even more ascetic. At small and medium scales there is a minimum of detail: only main roads, outlines of zones and districts, plus some POI elements. And only on the largest scales do road passages, signs with street names and outlines of buildings appear.


The horizontal mode is present, but it does not add anything new to the workspace.

The main menu has a monochromatic tiled interface, which migrated to the mobile application from car navigators, including small “back” and “shutdown” buttons. Despite multilingualism and several voice options for Russian alone, half of the menu items are indicated in English.

Settings appearance located in the Appearance menu. Here you can change the set of colors for the map itself, as well as control the display of labels of geographical objects and POIs on it.

In the Objects section, you can enable the display of sidewalks (pedestrian paths), houses as 3D objects (all of the same height) and traffic signs at intersections when driving along a route.

The map has some problems with displaying the contours of coastlines. Either the water disappears or the land disappears. Moreover, in most cases, objects are absent at all scales.

Brief summary
Liked: asceticism, the presence in the menu of buttons for quickly building “home” and “work” routes.

Did not like: slow map drawing and low detail on small scales, errors in drawing water bodies, partial Russification, exiting the application only by pressing a button in the menu.

Search and work with the map

Everything here is not as bad as one would expect from an application ported from car navigators, but not as good either. Main search- address. First, enter the name of the locality, then the street, and so on, using the keyboard built into the application.

As you type the names of geographic features, the list of results is automatically rearranged, offering the most suitable suitable options. In other words, the principle is the same as that of navigators 10 years ago. But the presence of the Online Search item partially saves the situation. However, this type of search requires access to the Internet and is, in fact, a single line of address entry. You can write “zarechnaya 15” and get a list of all settlements, where there is a street beyond the river, without taking into account whether there is house number 15 on it. But if it is there, by clicking on the corresponding element of the list, it will be shown on the map. However, this cannot be known just by looking at the list.

It is useless to search for everything else with its help. When you ask for proper names of various geo-objects or general names like “shop,” you will not get anything intelligible.

Searching the POI database is quite adequate. It has a lot of different categories, as well as objects in them.



The search for objects can be carried out around specified points on the map, near the current position, near the end point of the route or along its entire length.

You can also point your finger to any place on the map or any object and then, by clicking on the ball icon on the left, call up service menu, where you will be asked to get a route to this place, include it in an existing trip plan, get information about it or search for POI in the area, and also save the point in your favorites.

Brief summary
Liked: a large number of addressable objects, an extensive and structured POI database, it is possible to search for objects near specified points on the map.

Did not like: there is no normal general search; outdated interface; displaying the contours of houses and secondary roads, including courtyard driveways, only on the largest scales.

Relevance of maps

All maps used in the application are compiled from OSM maps. The map of Russia takes up 744 MB and is updated approximately two to three times a year. At the time of writing this material, version Q3 2014, released in February 2015, was available. The map has good detail of the road network, the relevance of which fully corresponds to the date in its title, i.e. the third quarter of last year. For example, there are no two new open sections of the M-11 Moscow-St. Petersburg highway.

Routes and navigation

The construction of routes occurs relatively quickly - literally in a few seconds. The corresponding menu contains a classic set of settings that allows you to select the type of route (fast or short), the type of vehicle and permission to lay routes along highways and their toll sections.


Routes can be edited by adding new points to them, which can then also be changed or deleted. Through the menu, you can search for POIs along the route or end and start points, and change the route by visiting them.

In general, the routes are being built adequately. But it was noted that in in some cases they may have an excess length (up to +20% at distances of ≈1000 km) or go around the places familiar to the author, the most convenient for travel.

The application also has the ability to play the route, but only if it was built from a point different from the current position according to the GPS receiver. In addition, there is no playback speed adjustment during playback.

Navigation support here is not much different from other applications. While driving along a route, the direction and distance to the nearest maneuver is displayed at the top of the screen, as well as the name of the current street or section of road and the one to which the turn will be made. When you click on this place on the screen, you go to the route settings, where, among other things, you can use the familiar “detour” function, which is called Road Blocking in the menu. However, unlike other applications, here you can specify the length of the blocked section of the route, which is very convenient.

If you leave the route, the application does not panic and simply silently rebuilds it.

Voice prompts do not cause any complaints. They are timely, but there are no settings, except for choosing one of three Russian-language voice options. There are about a hundred voice-over options available for download.

It is noteworthy that the application has a built-in database of stationary traffic cameras, as well as a mechanism for adding and displaying dynamic objects on the map.

The camera database is being updated, apparently along with the map itself. Dynamic objects are taken from the Internet, which requires from several tens to a couple of hundred kilobytes of traffic over a couple of hours of driving. The relevance of the database is consistent with the frequency of its updates, but its completeness is far from ideal.

The application also provides information about the current speed limit and provides customizable sound signal if it is exceeded by a certain threshold (10% or 20%).

Brief summary
Liked: speed limit alert.

Did not like: no information about traffic, low relevance of the camera database, does not offer alternative options routes.

All sorts of goodies

There are few additional functions in the application, and almost all of them are included in paid package. Only the function of obtaining the addresses of your friends from your address book and plotting a route to them is available for free.

It works in cases where people themselves indicate their address in their profile on the phone or in Google Plus, and also if data from any instant messenger, such as Skype, entered the address book. Among several hundred recipients from the address book in the author’s smartphone, there were only a few people who indicated their address. They all labeled it "Moscow" or something like that. By clicking on a contact, the application placed a marker on the map in the area of ​​the village “Moskva”, in the Kirov region. In general, it is logical.

The paid package consists of the function of projecting an image onto the windshield (for this, the image is displayed on the screen in a mirror form, and the smartphone must be placed closer to the windshield); speed limit warnings; display of mobile speed cameras; lane directions; more frequent map updates and personal technical support.

It would be nice to add a dash cam feature to this list. Although no one is stopping you from using applications from other developers at the same time.

Testing

This time, the speed characteristics were assessed on a smartphone with two Cortex-A9 cores operating at up to 1.2 GHz and 1 GB of memory. OS version - 4.2.2. And also on a single-core device with a gigahertz Cortex-A9, which was the main one in all our previous tests.

Route planning time and utilization of system resources

The time it takes to lay routes directly depends on their length. For relatively short distances of 100-150 km, this takes 1-3 seconds. A distance of 1800 kilometers on a dual-core device is “covered” in 7-10 seconds. But, alas, the application was not able to build a route from Moscow to Vladivostok at all. Even after 25 seconds of thinking.

When laying routes, the system uses all available CPU resources, which is why on a single-core smartphone the specified time has doubled. Overall, this is one of the slowest applications by this indicator among all those previously tested. Only Sygic performed these operations longer than him.

CPU resource consumption is also high. The dual-core system during route guidance was “puzzled” by 55-95%, depending on the speed. The single-core one showed the computing core load in the region of 95-100%. During stoppages, the computing load dropped sharply to 20-30%. But as soon as we started moving, it increased again almost to the maximum. Such a load could not but affect the battery life: its charge literally melted before our eyes. You can help matters by turning off the screen. IN background the application continues to work, providing the driver with voice prompts.

Network traffic volume per trip

Although the application is positioned as completely offline, it apparently periodically tries to obtain data on police ambushes from the Internet. But in the end we are talking about several tens of kilobytes of data per hour’s drive. But it’s hard to say what constitutes background traffic (when the application is not in use).

The absence of a network does not affect the performance of the application in any way.

Availability of objects in the database

Our old plate with a list of settlements, where we record the quality of cartographic and address information, will help us compare the quality of cartographic coverage. It does not give an absolute and objective assessment, but it will help you get your bearings a little.

be-on-road Navitel Progorod Sygic* Cityguide* Yandex
Olenegorsk, Murmansk region detailed, with houses detailed, with houses (3D) three main streets only the main street, with errors detailed, with houses detailed, with houses
Bogoroditsk, Tula region detailed, with houses detailed, with houses detailed, with houses (3D) only the main street detailed, with houses three main streets
Angarsk, Irkutsk region detailed, with houses detailed, with houses detailed road network only the main street detailed, with houses detailed, with houses
Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky detailed, with houses detailed, with houses detailed road network only the main street point on the route detailed, with houses
Astrakhandetailed, with houses detailed, with houses detailed, with houses (3D) detailed, with houses detailed, with houses detailed, with houses
Sochidetailed, with houses detailed, with houses detailed, with houses (3D) detailed road network detailed, with houses detailed, with houses
Chekhov, Moscow regiondetailed, with houses detailed, with houses detailed, with houses (3D) detailed, with houses detailed, with houses detailed, with houses
Tverdetailed, with houses detailed, with houses detailed, with houses (3D) detailed, with houses detailed, with houses detailed, with houses
Rybinskdetailed, with houses detailed, with houses detailed, with houses (3D) detailed, with houses detailed, with houses detailed, with houses
Pechory, Pskov region. detailed, with houses main road network three main streets, with errors detailed, with outlines of houses, without addresses detailed, with houses (people's map)
village Lanshino, Moscow regiona point on the map part of the road network a point on the map detailed road network detailed road network detailed road network

* data as of the beginning of 2014

Be-on-road looks pretty good compared to other commercial products, to say the least!

conclusions

Being an ideologically offline application, Be-on-road copes with its task quite well where there is no access to the Internet or very expensive roaming. It has a quite tolerable interface (the Russification would be corrected...), a relatively good POI database and well-designed maps. The navigation mode is also quite good. It even includes warnings about speed limits and the location of speed cameras. The only disappointing thing here is the high load on hardware resources.

Other shortcomings include infrequent map updates (about twice a year), lack of traffic information, and low detail at small scales, which is done for the sake of improving overall performance. But the main thing is that the application and all the cards, of which there are now more than 280, are absolutely free! In a word, we recommend it.

The BE-ON-ROAD program for pedestrian, bicycle and auto navigation will help you plot a convenient route and guide you to a specified place, search in a POI library of objects, and find out in advance about speed limits or established speed cameras. The function of recording the distance traveled is available. GPS navigation BE-ON-ROAD for iPhone allows you to update maps for free and start navigation mode without an Internet connection.

Possibilities:

  • three navigation modes - pedestrian, car, bicycle;
  • voice accompaniment;
  • huge database of offline OSM maps;
  • display of speed cameras;
  • record of the route taken.

Principle of operation:

As with most OpenStreetMaps-based navigation utilities, you must download the map to your device's memory before using the program. The detailing of objects directly depends on the volume of the loaded map.

The application menu is Russified, access to the main functionality is provided by clicking on the button with the image of horizontal stripes. On the back of the screen there is a camera icon. With its help, you can inform other users about the installed speedcam.

The main menu of the program is divided into six items. To select the main navigation mode, select the “Destination” icon. This section contains address search, route planner, history of visited places, The address book and a coordinate wizard where you can find out your location.

The most interesting features are offered in the Premium version. This is a diagram of the location of speedcams, a projector on the windshield of the car and navigation using photos. The cost of Bi-On-Road Premium is 15 euros.

Some users note that they do not like the design of the program - some of the buttons have different sizes and it is difficult to use the interface “blindly” iPhone screen not very comfortable.

Pros:

  • the application can be used as a free navigator when roaming;
  • interface in Russian;
  • advance recommendations for rebuilding;
  • auto switch to night mode;
  • free map update.

Minuses:

  • not very convenient design of the program;
  • no traffic alert system;
  • The speedcam database is available for a limited number of countries and for a fee.

If we do not take into account the lack of synchronization with online libraries of traffic jams and accidents, then we have a good product for navigation, which is primarily focused on routing for travelers. With the help of Bi-On-Road, you can save on network data transfer while roaming, and thanks to the large database of POI points, your smartphone turns into a reliable assistant that will guide you to the desired object.

Analogues:

  • Navmii GPS Russia - free navigation software based on OSM;
  • Yandex.Navigator is a powerful solution for online navigation.

The BE-ON-ROAD software application is an offline built-in smartphone GPS navigation. In other words, this is a navigator for Android devices that does not require an Internet connection. IN this application can be used simultaneously NAVTEQ, which contains maps High Quality, as well as OpenStreetMap, free graphic data.
This offline navigator for Android provides convenient and easy navigation, with which you can quite accurately and quickly determine your location or find the desired destination and find the shortest route to it. We offer you to download the BE-ON-ROAD application in Russian for free on your mobile phone.

All maps, as well as the BE-ON-ROAD application itself on your phone, are updated in automatic mode. The update procedure does not require action on the part of the user (if this function is activated on the device itself).
For faster offline access, maps are saved to the smartphone and remain there until updates are released for them. They can be used without an Internet connection.

The navigator for Android BE-ON-ROAD will warn you about all road signs and help you easily find cafes, restaurants, hospitals, gas stations and hotels. Using the application, you can quickly plot a route and quickly get to your destination.
IN new version BE-ON-ROAD application, which can be downloaded for free from our resource, the speed of loading maps, as well as their detailed drawing when changing the scale and moving, has become much faster and more energy efficient.
In order to indicate to the navigator the place you need to get to, you just need to point at the point of interest on the display of the device itself.

After performing these simple manipulations, the user will be prompted to add a start and finish point, after which a path with a minimum mileage will be laid out (the optimal route to follow to the specified point will be generated).

Among other things, the offline navigator has a search function, which is very necessary and, most importantly, pleasant. The new version of the application has eliminated a long-standing problem - a delay in typing the desired address.

Main features of the offline navigator for Android:

  • A large number of accurate maps.
  • The maps contain addresses, streets, as well as other public places (cafes, restaurants), etc.
  • Good map drawing speed and detail.
  • Clear and quick search route.
  • Automatic map updates on mobile device provided that this function is activated on the device itself.