What is best for gps & data for trip to spain and portugal?
 

Wife and I are visiting Spain and Portugal for 5 weeks next spring. Plan to spend a lot of time in the smaller towns and villages. Have the Michelin 180 page maps for the countries but would like to use gps. Also we use the great app "field trip" for information in larger cities. We currently have Verizon and it is fine for North American travel, $2 a day for Canada and Mexico. However it is $25 a day for Europe. Thinking of checking out the unlimited data plans for Sprint and T Mobile. Or possibly getting a sim card and use European services. Ideas?

Download the Here Maps app to your phone. You can then download maps for all of Spain and Portugal or parts of them. You can use them off line.

thanks but we already have great maps, just interested in using gps for finding the villas that we will be renting ad little out of the way places that you need to find by address.

If you purchase a sim card then just use google maps for gps. We used it in Spain for a month, and it worked really well.

I think it was Tim or Wind.

I use a TomTom GPS with free map updates for life.
For phones the best coverage in Spain is MovieStar. However they are not the cheapest.
Best is rather subjective.

Here Maps works as GPS. If you download the maps before you leave home you can navigate to your destination using your phone without the need for data. It is really easy to use. We used to for our grand tour of California a couple of years ago, and for all our trips in our camper in Europe.
Unless you really need data for your phone just use Here as I suggested. if you want to spend money fine, but that is up to you. Here is free.

We've had no problems with using T-Mobile the last several years. No overages and no extra charges.

We use both the Google and Apple Maps when out and about or planning a route (walking or driving).

The free data feature is excellent and $0.20/min for local calls is hard to beat, as is the free WiFi calling feature on the iPhone and certain Android models.

We just returned from Paris where most service was 3G, but you often pick up 4G and LTE service, depending on the area and provider.

We've used our trusty old Garmin Nuvi with the "City Navigator Europe NY: Spain and Portugal" software. It is badly named - we almost didn't get it, but it is NOT just for cities, coverage is good in the countryside. We had it going head-to-head with DW's smart phone, dueling navigators, very funny and sometimes at loggerheads, so a look at a map had to be done to play referee... It worked fine.

I have done it both ways: switched to T-Mobile to use it in Europe (unlimited free data is throttled to 2G speeds, which you only notice if you try streaming a video or something) and bought local SIM cards for my phone. On my last trip, I was in several countries so having T-Mobile made it much easier to deal with; nice to have data immediately after crossing a border with no fuss. But if I were visiting only one or two countries, I might well go with the local SIM approach again.

Note that not all smart phones can pick up the fast (4GLTE or 3G) data frequencies used in Europe. My cheap Android that I use every day in the US as a 4GLTE phone works only on slow 2G "Edge" networks in Europe. Knowing this, I bought an international version of my same phone before my last trip, so I would have a 4G phone everywhere I traveled. If you have a higher-end smart phone, it may will have all the fast frequencies you need for Europe, though.

FYI, your phone will work as a GPS WITHOUT data - if you download the maps ahead of time. (GPS without maps is kind of pointless for road navigation, unless you just want to know your current GPS coordinates or something.) I use Google Maps - never tried the others, never needed them, because Google Maps works just fine. Having mobile data is really nice, though, to look up something on the fly - or to navigate public transit in the cities.

I use the Google Hangouts Dialer app to make FREE phone calls home to the US while out of the country. It works on WiFi or mobile data, free even to call landlines. (The person you are calling doesn't need Google Hangouts, obviously not possible if you have a landline.)

Andrew, I believe what we did with Google maps with data was plot our course, get going, then turn off the data, and we still got gps. The benefit of having data is if you make a wrong turn or change your mind, you can turn the data back on, and get re-routed. Does this sound right?

Yes, you can do it that way, sundriedtopepo - but if you want to save all of your data, you can download the whole map region for the area where you'll be driving ahead of time, on WiFI. Then you can choose a route when you get in the car, even without mobile data. And Google Maps can re-route you even if you make a wrong turn or change your route or something. It has all of the maps loaded so doesn't need data on the fly.

The pre-loaded map won't have info like gas stations and restaurants, though, which would be a big benefit of having mobile data while you drive.

Also, you'll need a certain amount of free space on your phone to download the maps ahead of time.

thanks for all the great info, sound like both will work very well. now just need to make the choice.