Originally Posted by
cressers
Downloading the full country is so much better than caching the route on google.
Actually this is one of the things I wish they would fix. For most countries, the map granularity is the entire country, not at a state level. So for example, if you're going to Australia you need to download the entire country (~750MB) even if you're only interested in one state. Not a major problem if you remember to do it before you leave home, but frequently a challenge if you're trying to download via airport/lounge/hotel/etc Wifi.
A few countries have state-level (US, UK, France, etc) but not most of them.
Originally Posted by
cressers
Negatives - not so good for finding businesses/shops/etc as google - assume data points are less dense...
As I mentioned above, online searching is much better than it's fixed/offline POI database. If you don't have a data plan then try doing the search when you're on Wifi - it'll remember your selected results even when you're offline again.