Windows Mobile 6.1 Map Suggestion
Mon, 02/04/2013 - 7:37pm
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    17 years
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A friend stopped by a while ago and is looking for suggestions for an on board map program compatible with Windows Mobile 6.1. Is Co-Pilot pretty much THE choice or are there other viable options?
A few options for WinMo
I'd say if he can find or purchase a copy of iGO MyWay for Windows Mobile that it would be "best of breed" (if only because iGO is SO customisable) for that OS. That said--it's been ages since I used a WinMo based smartphone so I'm not even sure if iGO even offers a Windows Mobile app anymore; if there's a port of Garmin or TomTom for WinMo he could go with that too (there wasn't when I had a WinMo device, things could have changed in the meantime).
(That said, I REALLY wish they would actually sell iGO for Android. CoPilot is very nice, but (alas!) iGO is only available with certain OEM phones and can't be purchased at any price (and is rather more tweakable than CoPilot is). Ah well, we DID just get TomTom for Android and there's strong rumours that Garmin may be porting over its software for Android, so there's always hope...)
I will also note that he may be at that point with smartphones where he might start having issues in finding programs in general; Windows Mobile as a platform, and particularly WinMo 6.1 and below, are basically abandonware and have been for some time (Microsoft, bless their hearts, seem intent on merging the WinCE and WinNT codebases; Windows 8 supposedly works nicely on smartphones but is an utter disaster on the desktop, and Windows Phone 7 supposedly wasn't bad but was also not backwards compatible with WinMo 6.1 or 6.5).
At most, he's probably going to be able to update to (at best) WinMo 6.5 or POSSIBLY an older version of Android--usually through unofficial ROMS (heck, I even "upgraded" my WinMo smartphone to 6.5 even though no official port ever came out for it, and at least some HTC WinMo devices apparently make pretty good Android machines too--the HTC HD2 in particular being almost legendary in this regard)...otherwise he may find (even more so than Blackberry users using the "original" BlackberryOS) that he's in a world of discontinued and abandoned programs. This is going to depend largely on what he has, though, but if an upgrade ROM of some sort is available he can probably find at least some support on XDA-Developers for it, and I'd strongly recommend he do so if it's an option for him.