I did the whole flip phone thing for awhile and you can load a version of google maps onto most phones that run Java applets.
Also, I worked on an epaper feature phone startup. But as a company we never got it to take off. I open sourced it to an extent but havent worked on it as much as I would have hoped.
http://woodstead.org/epaper.html
I had phone that could run J2ME but did not have Internet.
I reverse engineered a flash application that showed a map and provided address search. I scraped the map tiles and address to location database. Reimplemented the viewer application as a Java applet and preloaded the tiles and address database to a microSD card connected to the phone. So essentially I built my own offline maps for my not internet connected phone.
Address search required prefix tree because IO was too slow to use binary search on the phone.
Anyway this was done just before I went to a new city to attend university and it was really helpful to find out where I am and where to go. There was no navigation, but it showed the map, gps location and the location where I needed to get to.
So that was my personal project that really had great utility for me.
I remember someone back then wrote a script to scrape Google Maps data and make it viewable on the GP2X, so you'd have offline portable maps. This was in 2007 or so, before smartphones became mainstream (not that as a student I could have afforded one anyway, or a data plan for that matter).
As some people have already been pointing out, try maps.google.com in Opera Mobile (if you have an android device handy). I honestly think they just don't care about most mobile browsers.
The browser, maps, and email were the core functionality and appeal of the smart phone. Two were provided by google (maps and gmail native) and the third had google search set as default.
No GPS, but will opera mini run maps at all do we think? Perhaps openstreetmap? I generally know where I am, it's going the right way I have trouble with...
I was talking about a number of sites all over the web (including several at Google) that user agent string sniff and tell opera that it isn't supported, not maps specifically.
But, speaking of maps specifically, maps.google.com in desktop Opera works fine, but clearly you didn't try using Opera Mobile, because as soon as you start dragging the map, it disappears.
I remember one example was that you can go to maps.google.com and click on a phone icon, and it just sends it straight to your phone which opens a map in the same place
That's in Android 2.2...which my phone (HTC Evo 4G) is supposed to be getting today!
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