Mario Advisor is a free J2ME application to display Garmin IMG maps on your Java capable mobile phone, along with the associated metadata such as points of interest, road labels, etc. Free Garmin maps can be downloaded from many sources around the web such as garminmapsearch.com, or translated from Open Street Map data. You can even create your own maps with the help of GPSMapEdit and cGPSmapper and view them on your cellphone using this program.

To open and display IMG maps on your mobile phone:

Create a folder called “mario” in root of your mobile phone’s filesystem and copy Garmin IMG files to that directory. Mario Advisor will display map data and labels for roads, Points Of Interest and cities without performing any conversion.

Maps can also be stored inside the installable Jar file, to avoid the confirmation request every time a file is accessed. To do so, copy maps in the “maps” folder inside the Jar file, and update the file “map_list.txt” with the names of the files included. Then uninstall and reinstall Mario Advisor and it will install the IMG maps in the desired location automatically. Note that the JAR file can be opened and edited with WinRAR.

Navigation keys include:

+ Up,down,left,right: pan
+ Fire,0: zoom in/out
+ *: center view in GPS coordenates
+ #: road names on/off

Mario Advisor also includes support for internal JSR179 and external bluetooth GPS receivers with NMEA. When GPS is connected, the view is centered in your current location.

Click here to download Mario Advisor for Java J2ME mobile devices. Maps need to be downloaded and installed separately.