As I am looking at my ugly G1 phone, I have positive and negative feelings about it, especially in light of two of my friends having purchased Verizon Motorola DROID and three of my other friends having purchased T-Mobile Motorola Cliq. Certainly one of the good things about G1 is that there are many various solutions and hacks available for my phone; among many is the fantastic turn-by-turn Google Maps.apk. I spelt out the .apk package on purpose. Many people get confused and think that Google Maps with turn-by-turn comes/created exclusively on Verizon's DROID phone. This is not so, this is a fully native evolved Google Maps app that will be, sooner or later, available on all devices that currently run Google Maps native app (with some exceptions like hardware restrictions or legal issues such as iTunes store prohibition).
Nevertheless, I was convinced that I don't need my stand-alone GPS navigator anymore (which at this very moment is listed for sale on craigslist) and I was thus determined to make this Google turn-by-turn run on my G1 using a solution from xda-developers forum. There, I found even simpler way to go about it, with a simple bash script:
#### Begin Script #### echo "Mounting /system read write..." mount -o rw,remount -t yaffs2 /dev/block/mtdblock3 echo "Cleaning out old Map software from /system for" echo "installation of Google Navigation" find /system -iname "*Maps.apk*" -exec rm -vf {} \; echo "Copying MyFaves and new Google Maps to /system/app" cd /sdcard/apks #cp MyFaves.apk Maps.apk /system/app/ cp Maps.apk /system/app/ echo "Modifying /system/build.trout.prop for Google Navigation" sed -i 's/tmobile\/kila\/dream/=verizon\/voles\/sholes/g' /system/build.trout.prop echo "Mounting /system back to read only..." mount -o ro,remount -t yaffs2 /dev/block/mtdblock3 #### End Script ####
If you dare to do this, make sure you go to xde-developers forum for full instruction and pre-requisites.