serpantino: Good point but surely all android GPS apps will also use data traffic. Is your phone contract/locked to one carrier? I bought an American HTC phone years back that was android and used a British mobile company.
Wishbone: No, why would they? GPS is not facilitated by a data network, it's a satellite signal. Several satellite signals rather, containing a synchronised timestamp, which are picked up by the GPS unit (in this case the phone). From the difference in timestamps between the different signals, the GPS unit calculates the relative difference in the distance to each satellite, and from this it can calculate its precise location in relation to those satellites.
And no, my phone is not locked to one carrier, but I'm not buying a new phone subscription for another country when I'll only be there for a week ;-)
My mistake, I apologise. I was tired and not thinking straight, I forgot that Google Maps streams from the net hence the data requirement, I usually save the maps offline in advance to get around that. The only free GPS app that I'm aware of for Android is MapDroyd but I've never tried it.
Also a sim card costs on average £1 here for a pay as you go one. It might be worth looking into just for the sake of convenience. Some offer rolling data plans as well such as Asda Mobile (Asda is a supermarket chain owned by Walmart.). The sim cards themselves can be found in any asda store and usually cost £1 and once activated you can top up £10 and then text 10 to 2732 (free) and you'll get unlimited texts, 100 minutes talk time and 100mb of data for 30 days. No contract is required but any call time/data left over expires 30 days. I don't know what other companies supply as I'm with Asda Mobile and I top up like that when I'm travelling.
