You use your smart phone for finding the best local pizza place, and then use an app that gives directions to pick up your order. Apps that give weather forecasts, real-time driving conditions, and any number of other bits of useful advice are just a quick download and a few taps on the touchscreen away. Hunters and anglers also use smartphones in the field, but are GPS units obsolete? Frank Miniter weighs the pros and cons of both.

“These days I mark the locations of scrapes, rubs and stand sites with my iPhone’s touch screen before using cloud computing to install them on interactive aerial photos on my iPad. Meanwhile, alongside the waypoints, I place photos of terrain I snap with my phone. My favorite app also lets me use an icon of a trail camera where I can place trail-cam photos of the bucks in the places they were photographed. So does this mean we can retire our GPS units?”

Miniter compares the two units on cost, dependability, ease of use, and more. Find out how the GPS stacks up against today’s smartphones.

Photo by: Bushnell