All of us use Google Maps for finding any location/ place anywhere in this world. As we all know, Google Maps is a online application and it needs a good internet connection to work properly. Also, its not possible to save the maps for offline access. So if you are moving out of your parent city to some other place, its possible that you may not get a good speed of internet with 3G/ GPRS etc., or even if you have a good connection, the data charges are too much to stay online for using maps.

Today we will talk a bout a Free Android App Mapdroyd which lets you browse maps that can be stored on your Device SD/ Memory card for offline access. You can just download the map you need and save it on your Phone’s SD card. Next time when you need to find something anywhere on a map, just launch Mapdroyd and you can find it without going online.

MapDroyd provides has its own built-in map browser to explore and download selected map files the map server. It can also find updated maps as soon as they are updated on servers and you can download them. Maps can be downloaded directly to the device, or optionally you canuse your desktop computer to download it.

It can turn map view into any angle as per you requirement by rendering maps on the fly whichis great for navigation applications and draws all labels (city names, streets names, places, etc.) properly based on orientation of the device.You can even use “auto-rotate” function to turn the map direction according to your real orientation (“head-up”).

This tool is based on OpenStreetMap. When you install MapDroyd, it will ask you to download the Maps. Just select any location which you need from anywhere in the world and download the map. As the Maps are too big for a Phone’s Net connection, hence you should download the maps using your WiFi connection. For India, the Map size was 32 MB.

The Maps worked great and it did gave me a almost street level details. I was able to navigate thru it quite easily. Just keep in mind, dont expect it to replace Google maps with this as Google Maps do provide some additional features like search feature and better Navigation. BUt as I said before, Navigation is not possible with Google Maps unless you are online.

MapDroid is a Free App and is available in Android Market.

PS: Thanks Ash for the tip.