iFly GPS Forum

Ok this has probably been beaten to death in the past but i cant find it. Im looking for a more inexpensive tablet arround the 7-8" range to put in my airplane witht he I fly App. Now i have an amazon fire tablet but it needs an external gps source. im looking for somthing with a built in gps that will work while flying with no wifi, data connection, or internet. When i talk to tablet professionals they seem to be clueless. I recall having a samsung tab 2 and it worked on therebut that was quite a while back. any recomendations would be appreciated!! thanks

This very well could devolve into a ford vs chevy or cessna vs piper type rivalry game, but your best bets will be a new samsung galaxy tab or (and I know that I am posting this in the android sector) an iPad mini WiFi + Cellular. 

Galaxy tab has an advantage over expandable memory, iPad has advantage in being able to be plug and play, but you might be hamstrung by memory issues... I made the mistake of buying a 16gb iPad and quickly learned that I need at least 32 gb to have other apps than iFly, haha!

To 99% of tablet users, "GPS" = "Google Maps" or some similar mapping tool that is constantly reaching into the cloud to pull in the next bit of map data, search for restaurats around your current location, compute driving directions on demand, pull up real time traffic data, etc., etc.

But if what you mean by "GPS" is "Can the device compute my lat/lon/altitude and make that information available to apps independent of internet access", then any Android phone or tablet will be able to do that.  (Not all iPads can...only the ones with celluar data capability also include built-in independent GPS receivers.)

Note that if you plan to use your Android device in conjunction with an external ADSB-in receiver (like a Stratux), then that ADSB device will have its own GPS receiver and iFly will give preference to that external GPS, only falling back to the Android internal GPS if the external receiver is unavailable.