Komoot has ample settings for your planning and navigational needs. It has a choice between hiking, road cycling, cycling with gravel and mountain bike genres. Now I haven't used it for navigational purposes before but as I head off on my new trip I will be keeping it in mind and doing a full review via video when I return.
For planning it is working out well. It is giving me a more accurate route than Google Maps. How do I know this? Because some of the routes I am planning are through forestry and national parks and I have compared Komoot to the parks' PDF maps. I used Komoot in the initial stages of my Brisbane trip when I began planning last year. Komoot gave me an accurate account of the Brisbane Valley Rail Trail as "the route" to take on a bike. Google Maps in comparison took me along the D'Aguilar Hwy. I was also looking for the Bicentennial National Trail section that runs from Boolboonda to Mt Perry when I was planning my Burnett trip.
Now it may not find it directly under the genre you have entered in. For example, when looking for the BNT it didn't map me via that section via the BNT under cycling with gravel. But when I changed the preference to hiking as my genre...Bob's ya knob, there it was.
When I first started playing with it I thought that the free version was really restricted. I didn't think that it worked off-line. But recent uses are proving it is the user that is somewhat restricted, not the app. You can easily download the planned route of your choice onto your smart device for off-line use. This makes me very excited as a lot of the trip I plan on doing may not have service.
The routes can be easily planned and edited on your computer or on your smart device. You can plan down to the kilometer of distance you wish to travel just by clicking on the map and designating it as the start, the end or a point in between.
I am finding it easier to plan via my computer, saving that route to my profile and that way I can access it via a varieties of devices that I have the app loaded onto. Using the computer also allows you to use Google Maps in conjunction with it. The reason I am doing this is that Google Maps is more likely to have smaller areas highlighted. This is more of a safeguard than anything and is not a fault or minus on the Komoot App. I am sure Maps will be gone by the wayside when I am confident in my use of the app.
After double checking on Maps, more so my destination, I then switch to Komoot and plan my route. It will give you a basic route, but like Maps you can click and drag the drawn route to a more preferred one. This, along with the changing of the genre gives you far more route options that other mapping apps I have used. Not only that, it gives you great off road routing, and that for me is such a big bonus.
So over the next few weeks prior to my departure I will be using it more and more. I want to become familiar with it because I am loving what I see. It's just a shame that I have been such a gumby in the past in regards to it and have restricted the app to far less than it's capabilities.
So as I use it more my impressions are becoming, well, more impressed and I look forward to getting some sort of mount for my phone to use it as a navigator with this awesome app on my upcoming travels. So at this stage I am giving it a big thumbs up, and I am sure as I become more familiar with it, it will go from thumbs up to...
Cheers guys, and as always ride safe...
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