Because I haven’t purchased a gps since 2012 I haven’t used one since then either and I have had no problems with my phone and was curious about some of the new gps on the market and was curious what other dudes are using. Sorry me proving you wrong about a phone caused you to go on a passive aggressive rant lol
It's pretty clear from the responses that most of the people here
1) have no clue about using a good gps app on a phone,
and
2) can't answer a simple freaking question and instead answer something different, like whether a gps or paper maps are better.
Good grief.
Might as well throw in my experience, and attempt to answer what you actually asked: I carry an iPhone with a gps app, plus a backup battery pack, and no longer bother with a dedicated GPS because I see no reason to carry one.
My relevant background - I'm not a back country multi-day hunter, but our hunting property is large enough for day trips and plenty thick enough to get lost in, so I use a gps there. More relevant, I've been into fairly hard core dual sport (read street legal dirt bike, not the big road-bound stuff) exploring for a lot of years, which often involves following single track for miles in woods that offer limited visibility, so a gps is critical to figuring out where you are.
I started carrying a gps for those activities back when they had tiny monochrome low-res screens, but even that was a big help. Just knowing where you are relative to your backtrail made a big difference. Then the GPS units evolved a bit, with color and better res, but about the iphone 6s era, roughly, the smartphones started offering better maps and better resolution, with the same precision in my own testing. Once that happened, the dedicated units quickly became irrelevant to me.
Lots of half truths and outright bullshit have been claimed in this thread, here's my thoughts from direct experience.
My gps app handles offline maps easily; I typically download Google Terrain and Google Hybrid (satellite and streets) and can do so for anywhere in the world at no charge. No need to pay for more maps for specific areas. And I can load whatever map type I want, it's not limited to a certain brand or provider. Storage space is not a problem unless you're a moron with a phone full of porn and a full hard drive.
My gps app shows the back trail by default, as soon as a new track is started. In fact I don't know of a single gps app that doesn't do this; they generally work the same way as a Garmin or whatever in that respect.
Cell service is completely unnecessary. Any iPhone from gen 4 or newer will operate the gps (and a gps app of course) without cell service, giving you all the same features as a Garmin. Anything from a 6s or newer has a built in barometer as well so you can read density altitude too.
Visibility of the screen is a non-issue.
While I wouldn't intentionally swim with my iPhones, they've been dunked when I've fallen in stream crossings with no issue, and have handled a lot of miles of vibration. To be fair, the old iPhone 4s would sometimes overheat when using GPS in a clear case exposed to direct sunlight in the summer, but that hasn't been an issue on newer phones.
Battery life is less of an issue than most here are claiming, especially if you take some time to turn off all the things draining your battery. For about $30 you can get a good battery pack about the size of the phone that is good for another 4-8 charges, or a lot more for more $$. My battery pack is 20,000 mAh, so it's good for a long time. IIRC the phone battery is a bit less than 2,000 mAh, so do the math. And no, the battery packs are not "HEAVY". Mine weighs about the same as the phone.
None of this is about the need for paper maps or a compass or anything related to "comms". Or a swiss army knife, or a flashlight, or a rubber ding dong. It's just about whether a handheld GPS is better than the same functions on a smart phone. For me, I use the iphone.
Also, a lot of you less tech-savvy guys are probably still hung up on the word "phone". It's a handheld computer; learn to use it as such. The phone part is pretty irrelevant compared to anything else.
