When talking about the Tube map for mobiles that Transport for London and Orange provide, Jim Hughes pointed out to me that the image viewer on my phone also does a pretty good job of of viewing street maps. I don’t know why this didn’t ever occur to me before!

Multimap has a “light” version which is intended for PDA-like devices but which works perfectly well on my Nokia 6600. From there I can do a search on a London Street name or any UK postcode (there’s also a box for “places”, but I’m not really sure what this is useful for other than being able to start at a city and then zoom in on your target, provided you already know where it is). Once you’ve got your search result map, you can do options -> view image -> select the map image (gif.cgi) ->options -> save. Once done, you can disconnect and view the map in the phone image gallery at your leisure! The quality is definitely high enough to be able to read the street names and navigate with, and the scale is part of the image. Genius!

If you’re actually preparing in advance of course, you can do the search on your PC as per usual and transfer the image to your phone via Bluetooth (either by send to Bluetooth from the IE context menu or saving the image to disk and then sending to BT if you’re on something else like Firefox).

This is one technique I’ll definitely be using next time I’m going somewhere new. All I have to find now is a street map of Paris. 🙂

I forgot, of course, that multimap has maps of just about everywhere, not just the UK – hurrah!