Google Maps Navigation hacked for extra-American use
By Vlad Savov 
posted November 23rd 2009 9:19AM
posted November 23rd 2009 9:19AM
Guess what, prospective Milestone owners, the Droid's one major advantage over its Euro cousin has just been coded out of existence by those proactive, un-American XDA Developers. The free Google Maps Navigation service, whose US announcement was so shocking as to decimate the stock prices of satnav purveyors Garmin and TomTom, has now been ported to work outside the land of the free as well. Not only that, but you can use the app on other Android devices, meaning your old G1 can get a breath of fresh air for absolutely free. That is if you don't count the time it takes you to learn how to insert all the code properly and the risk of bricking your device in the process. But we know our readers eat iron nails for breakfast and fashion elegantly optimized code before lunch, so we expect all of you to be using this by day's end, you hear?
Android, Let me count thy ways to manipulate you.
Hero CANT USE THIS YET.
since its android 1.5, and not android 1.6!
donut is required
This.
Fair point, I've removed the Hero reference to avoid confusion.
Hero can use it, you just need to flash a custom ROM, which is what XDA is all about. Check out Clean ION 1.6, though I'm sure 2.0 ROMs will come soon enough, with the source finally out
no fully working 1.6 roms out there yet for hero ;) so pretty much a no go so far
sucks for Sprint :(
Iron nails for breakfast give me a tummy ache.
Try switching to jagged metal Krusty-O's.
Shooter McGavin: "I eat pieces of shit like you for breakfast!"
Happy: "You eat pieces of shit for breakfast?!"
-jp
Cool. Now sell it in Ireland.
F' yeah.. had this working a little while ago. Very easy install if you're already on the path of using modded roms on your G1.
Yes I look at my G1 not as a phone mostly but as a project in hackery, that just continually makes it better even with its sub par hardware and sluggish initial performance with the standard t-mobile g1 image. Until you can hack the droid I'd have no reason to upgrade my phone...
Same here, I am on my head for a new phone but the hackable G1 just keeps getting better. Still waiting for a 3G ATT device, so the G1 keeps me saciated.
The Google Nav is great too. It's a treat to use and helped deliver my first child. FACT.
I concur. It let me find Beyonce's crib too, but it didn't warn me that I'd drive into Jay-Z's fist ! So, its a lil' buggy for now.
aaand XDA is down :P
Yes, that was happening all weekend and the performance of the forums has been poor for a couple of weeks now (since the HD2 was released).
Just a coincidence. Today was scheduled a maintenance day
Decimation is to destroy 10% of something. They did much worse than decimation :)
Amazingly, words can have more than one meaning.
3 a : to reduce drastically especially in number b : to cause great destruction or harm to
Decimal.
Base 10.
The Romans picked out every 10th person and killed them.
10% is not drastically reducing or great destruction.
Mikero, I think you kind of missed the point.
In ADDITION to the meaning you quoted, 'to decimate' can also mean 'to cause great destruction' (with 'great' potentially much larger than 10%). Check a dictionary: http://www.answers.com/decimation
Nah, I understand :)
I know language is a changing thing and all, but up until a couple of years ago, it had only one meaning.
It just annoys me that the understood meaning of a word is being changed through ignorance.
Try convincing a mathematician that decimal is anything other than the base 10 and see what happens.
Anyhow! We don't need to keep arguing it :)
Up until a couple of years ago?
"The earliest English sense of decimate is “to select by lot and execute every tenth soldier of (a unit).” The extended sense “destroy a great number or proportion of” developed in the 19th century." (http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/decimate)
I've had Google Nav on my CM'ed G1 for the past two weeks or so, its pretty awesome
But yeah to repeat someone else's point it CANNOT I repeat CANNOT BE INSTALLED ON THE HERO
The current modification to the obex and build.init files will only enable it to be used on Donut devices. The current build of HTC Sense is based on the 1.5 framework and is therefore incompatible. HTC has also stated that they will be passing over 1.6 for HTC Sense and will be going directly to 2.0 and would therefore get Google Nav natively so unless it can be ported all the way back to cupcake then theres no point in bothering to attempt to mod it on to the Hero
Sorry didn't mean for that to come off as a rant, just wanted to get the technical points of that across :)
oops meant odex not obex in that last comment
and the risk of bricking your device?????
This has ZERO chance to brick a phone!
well not really :P ppl still screw up rooting etc ;)
ok i stand corrected. you dont even need root anymore it seems ;)
Had this up and running a week ago its better than my in car navi because I don't need to update it or buy a new disc from Honda to update it. And i can do a search on my current route for whatever I desire on my trip like food or fuel... a lot more functionality than my in dash unit.
Anyone know how to get that navigate to widget shown in the picture on G1?
im wondering the same thing, i've had the hacked google's navi for a while but im wondering if this is from the droid navigation.
It's very easy to install if you have a donut ROM. Between this, and beta 2.0 ROMS floating around, my G1 still has plently of life in it left!
Done
I'd like to get this running on my French HTC Magic (SFR), but the link doesn't like me. Someone above said XDA is down, is that right? Play the waiting game?
Works great on my G1 1.6 donut roms (I've used it sucessfully on CM and Soulife roms, didn't work on Hero or Eclair), I even added it to my wife's G1 and that says alot, if it didn't work flawlessly she wouldn't be happy.
Go-go-XDA!
Don't you think that the main problem is that : this is just illegal !!?
how is this illegal?
isn't the whole android about being open source allowing users to install what they want. It's a joke and a mistake that it wasn't originally included in the milestone for two reasons:
1. the name Milestone is kind of related to navigation!
2. It would sway a whole lot of customers to buy the milestone
well afaik all google apps are closed source, this was the reason cyanogen got a C&D letter :P
lets hope they dont make that 'mistake' again, because this will boost their sales, while themselves not breaking the agreements they have on the non US maps (their contract prevents them from using them for turn by turn) until they do get the right to use turn by turn on those area's
Just to straighten this out, the procedure described on XDA does not brick your phone. Having said that, it is not impossible to do, if you count rooting your phone as part of the procedure (however, this is not necessary for this particular modification, see post).
In addition, XDA is down, but here is the link to the post:
http://74.125.93.132/search?q=cache%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fforum.xda-developers.com%2Fshowthread.php%3Ft%3D583123
That's how it appeared 11 hours ago, when the fix was already posted. All links in the post are still live.
How long until the Droid gets pinch-zoom and other multitouch that the Milestone will have? I'm not up on that scene ;)
Nice.
I was unsure whether I still wanted a Droid (Or rather, Milestone) when i heard about this.
Of course the other factor is is it a Google Experience or "With Google" device?
If it is, I'll order one from Italy without hesitation.
If not... well, then I still have some thinking to do : /
Hm. Would love to see that pinch-to-zoom browser ported over to the US Droid...
illegal? the only reasons i want a android phone is cus of google gps navagator! if not, i stay with my windows mobiles phone!
the more important question is when does the iphone get this app?
hopefully never.... less bragging rights for the iPhone owners
get lost fanboy, Android has moved along much more so than the iphone did in it's first year, I love my old G1. I have been using the nav for about 2 weeks, the satellite view is awesome, especially when coupled with the restaurants layer.
talk about the pot calling the kettle black. hypocrisy is a motherf*cker
I have that wallpaper. ^-^