What do you do for navigation? (Thats literally the only feature keeping me with a smart phone right now).
I like to use my phone to navigation. Especially public transport in Berlin, however as I start to learn routes I don't need it as much as two years ago.
Recently my wife tried to get to a place on Streetname 65A, but Google Maps showed her only Streetname 65 (without A) and it was a wrong place. I found it on OpenStreetMap - it was a building on the other side of the street. That was a lesson for me and installed Maps from F-Droid (an ad-less fork of mobile Maps.Me). It is an amazingly detailed map and offline one as well.
So even with smartphone one has to be always prepared to ask around or plan in advance, so maybe after all it's not as good as we like to think.
But that doesn't follow from what I wrote. I keep my whole country plus the neighboring one on my tablet. And airports tend to have Wifi :)
Nowadays storage is cheap. The entire North American continent extract of OSM takes less than 8GB. Buy a cheap mini-SD card and you can carry the whole world map around.
Abandoning modern technology doesn't seem like the better alternative in this case.
It was useless, because it constantly routed me to the closed segment of the road. I had to manually select some far away point to finally get it to ignore the road almost completely, because I did not know how much of it was closed.
One was on a German side of a major highway connecting Germany and Poland. The other on Berlin's main highway. It was after midnight so it was a challenge, but it probably was a scheduled maintenance.
I used to get to the destination station, and would wait for the phone to get a reliable connection to download the map tiles... then the dodgy phone "compass"/magnetometer needed calibration, so wave it in a figure eight for a while, try to reconcile surroundings with arrow that keeps flipping direction, etc.
I get on much better with "south out of station, left onto X street, right onto Y street, final left onto Z street, then watch out for that building eyeballed on Google Streetview earlier".
The other day, I left home intending to go to a hospital near where I live. As I usually do, I plugged my phone into my car and tried to tell it to navigate there. But for some reason it hung while trying to contact Google to locate the address.
So I rebooted my phone, and rebooted my car, to no avail. Eventually I gave up, and based on the general knowledge that the hospital was to the south east, took one of the main roads through the city east, until I saw the first of several blue "H" signs directing me to the hospital.
My car has an electronic compass as well, if I didn't know which way was east/south.
And then, what's wrong with asking someone for directions? I've been asked many times in the olden days and never once was it an unpleasant experience.
The frequently terrible answers!
completely wasting their time. use your phone.
Ask this 14 year old....
https://www.cnn.com/2018/04/14/us/michigan-man-shoots-at-tee...
The last thing I want to do is be lost somewhere in the South. Yes I live in the south.
The "anecdote" is even in my own neighborhood, if my son invites some of his White friends (who are his guests) to hang out at our neighborhood pool. He gets asked does he belong there? Do you think I would leave him in a position to have to walk up and ask a random stranger for directions if he got lost while driving?
It was sheer luck that both the teenager didn't die and the guys own camera showed he was lying. If the boy had been killed the man would have gotten off. If the camera hadn't been there, they would have taken the word of "upstanding member of society -- a retired fireman" over the word of "just another teenage thug" and the boy would have been arrested.
Not to detract from your experience (after all, you live there), but I doubt that situation is representative of most of the world.
I must give off some kind of approachable vibe, because I get asked for directions by strangers at least once a week.
Why is, it in these type of questions, people always immediately go to the worst case scenario to try and prove their point? What about the average case: people again learn to plan their routes in advance, use their instincts, road signs, and if necessary, how to use a map.
You also assume you can't get lost using a GPS. All data has the potential to be stale. Maybe the route the gps took you is through a mountainous road where there is no signal. What happens when you come across an unfamiliar geographical feature and are unsure how to proceed, and now your gps cannot update your location? What if the location you are attemping to access is "net new" as in new roads? What if the location simply no longer exists and your mapping service has not been updated? In my experience, GPS is great for city driving with clear path to the sky (and >50% battery for any trip that is over an hour). Not so good in mountainous or remote locations. I imagine if we didn't rely on a computer telling us where something is, we would revert back to the default behavior of actually learning our surroundings, which has a host of other benefits that you never know would come in handy until they do.
I use my phone's GPS in the wilderness all the time and it's an amazing help. Having a topo map where you can see exactly where you are is awesome. Even just having altitude is a big help like the other day when I was trudging up a steep forested ridge and wanted to know how many more hundreds of feet I had to go before the summit.
Of course you can live without GPS, but I just can't make any sense out of arguing that it isn't anything other than amazing. I'd give up a lot of stuff before I'd give up GPS.
In another instance, I was working with someone in Seattle who had lived there about a decade, had a PhD (I mention only to point out they had some intelligence), and I mentioned I had to go to Tukwilla that night - maybe ten miles at most south of the Seattle city limits. She had no idea where Tukwilla was, had never been there.
So point being, whether it was pre-device based digital maps or today, most people have no idea where they are.
Alternatively, one could learn to read a map. That got me across the country and back on multiple occasions back in the day, and I don't recall ever getting too lost. I'm not saying we have to go back to sextants, but to me GPS is a nice convenience, not a requirement.
You can also get a road atlas for the regions you'll find yourself in. That's how I learned to navigate. It works just fine the vast majority of the time and the remaining time you just pull into a gas station and ask. It's not really a big deal.
Seems like keeping an iPad with cellular data around would be a good solution, but it starts to risk being "too good."
My car has a builtin GPS. Navigation has been an issue only once when joining a friend to a restaurant on foot, believe it or not I asked my way around and found the place.