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pragmatic

Anyone notice this has a GPS and Magnetometer (compass).

How useful will this be as a GPS without internet connectivity (wifi only)?

A 7" tablet would be a fantastic GPS device form factor.

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A new feature in Jellybean allows you to download city maps for offline usage.

http://www.engadget.com/2012/06/27/google-maps-offline-andro...

Thats been a Labs maps feature for a while in ice cream sandwich. Very useful when visiting places you dont want to spend money on expensive bandwidth, use it a lot...

I think I just found my reason (if I needed any) to get this tablet.

Offline Google Maps in the next iteration of Android would mean that you could download the maps offline for the area you usually travel to/around and be able to use it as a GPS (not sure how the new offline maps would work w.r.t. re-routing and all that)

I would love to see this for iOS, although I guess it's not likely.

I think routing requires a data connection.

Partially. It can reroute some roads without a data connection, but not major changes.

Offline Google Maps in the next iteration of Android

This is actually in the next iteration of maps...or rather the last iteration as it was released yesterday. If you upgrade Maps on an Android device, you get this functionality.

ICS has had this for a while now.

The mapping application is simply an app, having been decoupled from the OS back in, I think, 2.3? The labs functionality for offline access has been around for a while, but has been baked into the core app now.

The point being that it isn't an 2.3, 3.0, 4.0, or 4.1 feature. It's a Google Maps feature.

You could tether your phone's cellular data.

You can always tether from your companion ssmartphone. Or use Google maps's offline which were launched yesterday too.

I really could have used Google Maps offline a year ago when I was trying to get around Osaka. The GPS worked, but the map display didn't... unless I was around one of Japan's rare, free Wifi hotspots.

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