Price: $2.99 Score: 9/10 Genre: Navigation
Motion X GPS HD is an iPad optimized navigator designed for hikers, mountain bikers and other outdoor extremists on the go. Previously an iPhone app, this iPad optimized version delivers high quality maps and in depth functionality that tracks your location on street topographical/terrain, satellite, and hybrid maps, as well as experimental NOAA maps in marine areas.
There’s a slight learning curve that’s inherent to the Motion X GPS app, but with a little latitudinal knowledge and a bit of fiddling, this is the kind of app that will encourage you to take your iPad on every exploratory adventure. The big buttons and clear map views built off of Google, Bing, and others ensure precise accuracy. This is an excellent app that’s easy to use on the go, and creating waypoints (sort of like making a home base) brings you back to wherever you need to be.
The iPad version of the app lacks Track Recorder, Share, and Import, which all exist on the iPhone version of the app, but hopefully those features will come in a future update. This app is also probably not ideal for the basic Wi-Fi model of the iPad unless you plan on downloading maps via Wi-Fi and storing them for later use, not only because Wi-Fi isn’t readily available just anywhere, but also because it only guarantees Wi-Fi accuracy between 100 feet and 3 miles.
Bottom Line: Motion X GPS offers the kind of functionality that competes with Garmin and other GPS systems (as long as there’s 3G) with a much lower price point. 9/10
