The Google Maps Application on the smartphones has a cool feature to save maps and view them offline by just typing or speaking “OK Maps”. This feature helps the user save the map on his device which can be zoomed and accessed without internet. The following steps need to be followed:
Make sure that the phone or tablet has internet connectivity and then go on to your Google Maps app
Place yourself on the vicinity of the location which you would want to store offline
Type (or if on the smartphone, say) “OK Maps” (without quotes).
In case you’d want to speak it out, please have a pause between O and K, else Google with optimize it to “Okay”. On following the above directions, you would see a prompt indicating that the map is downloading. The amount of time it takes depends on the size of the map, but with decent data connection, it should take around 10-12 seconds.
You can go ahead and play with it, but you’d notice that if you try to have a map size greater than 10-15 miles, Google complains saying that the map size is too large to cache.
This is a very useful feature for people who have limited data availability while travelling and for those who would like to avoid carrying huge printouts of maps. I have tried the above on devices like Nexus 7, Nexus 10, Galaxy S4 and Galaxy note 8.0 and it seems to work seamlessly. I have however not tried it on iOS devices. Maybe some of you could experiment with this feature.
