8 posts tagged “gps”

LifeVine is destined to be that for which people were misusing sportstracker. That is, not for tracking their sportsactivities, but for their walks, hikes and holiday trips. Posting video's and pictures with a GPS log.  LifeVine is meant exactly for these things. It will log and publish your track, captured media and music you played during the trip. Already the current sportstracker is capturing the music info and displaying it in its mini-map on my phone. You can find a more detailed blurb about LifeVine on Nokia conversations, go here.

Early adopters might want to subscribe to the opening e-mail on the LifeVine website. I hope to find some refinements and extensions over the sportstracker website to be found in LifeVine.

Updated spelling: LiveVine ->LifeVine.

Hi Folks, AAS beat me to the news. Nokia Maps 2.0 is out of beta. Maps 2.0 is a huge improvement on 1.0. In the netherlands they directions now correspond with roadsigns info, routing is much improved. Pedestrian routing added. New improved userinterface, more countries added to the list of countries with supported voice navigation. Sattelite views for selected cities and support for integrated magnetic compass (Nokia 6210 Navigator). Real time traffic info support optionally. My existing license works under 2.0 as well as 1.0.

Take a look at AAS for a complete overview of the changes or swoop down to Nokia for the quick download.

Altough TomTom Navigator works on the N95 and other S60 3rd edition phones. It does not support the internal N95 GPS. For over a year now the N95-owners were forced to buy an external bluetooth GPS if they wanted TomTom to work on their phone. In comparison CoPilot, Route 66, Smart2Go/NokiaMaps, Navigon, Nav4All all worked with the internal GPS. However www.tweakers.net, a dutch tweakers-website, reports that a group of hackers called 'Binpda' have released a workaround for Tomtom Navigator 6.02. It works through adding an extra bluetooth profile and running a small virtual bluetooth-gps program that accesses the internal GPS. Allowing TomTom to connect with the internal GPS thinking it is an external bluetooth GPS.

Why TomTom themselves has not added support for a phone that has already sold over 10 million pieces is unclear to me. As such, Nokia Maps was the best option for me last year. This despite at that point there were some stability issues and missing AGPS support. I should say it worked well despite some lesser choices in routing. The price per year (for a 3-year license) was 1/6-th of that of a TomTom license per year. For those not needing it for daily driving during office hours and not requiring real time traffic info, it was a particular good choice. And cheap, very cheap since TomTom forced you to buy an additional bluetooth GPS mouse for another 60+ euros. For those looking for ultracheap satnav there is still Nav4All for the N95. Taking only a minimal of mobile internet usage to guide you. The cheapest yet unless roaming!

To date Nokia Maps 2.0 beta is nearly out of beta. It has been improved on nearly all fronts. It has the ability to use internet if available for POI searches and routing. It gained a much better display layout, much better routing and has become very stable. There is a AAS review of Maps 2.0 beta 1. Also real time traffic info data is now a extra option. And no, Nokia did not asked money for these free upgrades. Excellent and fair. In Nokia Maps 2.0 beta 2 only few bugs and issues remain. As such Nokia Maps 2.0 is becoming a serious competitor in price and quality compared with TomTom. And Nokia is already making in-roads into the car business. Renault is selling special edition cars with Nokia phone's with GPS navigation and factory built-in carkits (Renault Sandero Nokia with the N95, Renault Twingo Nokia edition with the Nokia Navigator 6110).

It looks that that gold digging in the satnav sector with PNA's is past its prime. And companies such TomTom will no longer be able to support themselves by selling PNA's. Looking back, putting TomTom on the stockmarket by their founders last year was a great way to cash-in timely. Convergence will connect all the different little sales markets of consumer navigation into one big battlefield. The fight for dominance and survival will become fierce. Giving consumers the top dollar for their euros.

There is a spiffy review of the new coming Nokia Maps 2.0 at All About Symbian. It really looks terrific. Rafe and Steve mention sattelite view, hybrid view, improved driving navigation interface, real-time traffic info for a price, a real walk mode, walk & drive mode. Hop over to AAS for the full story, click here. There are even more screenshots on Symbian-Guru. I wondered why Nokia did not hide a magnetic compas in the N95...

Carmenta seems to have an interesting competitive application too:

Convergence is here to stay it seems. Garmin, well known for it's GPS and navigation products has followed Apple's path to the mobile world. They announced their nüvifone here. The touchscreen user-interface look really finger oriented and easy to handle. It takes geo-tagged pictures, makes calls even during navigation (handsfree supported), can web browse, do Google local search and has PIM on board.

Garmin's press gallery shows a promising GPS-phone with an user-interface that looks clean and simple enough for anyone to use. Go here for the photos.

Location tagger is released by Nokia Betalabs.  It looks great, it's a stand-alone application. Integration a la Nokia Search will surely be coming somewhere in the future!  Symbian Guru had the scoop as far as I noted. Looks like a great and smart application. Flickr uploading is supported ;-)

Update: All About Symbian has a topstory on Location tagger with a nice description, screenshots and explanations. Click here to read.

Cheers,

   Snoyt

This is follow-up article on my article about first experiences with Nokia Maps 1.0. I have been running the new Maps for a couple of weeks now and can give you report about its stability and reliability. Maps 1.0 seem to run just as stable or unstable as the previous version did. Maybe even a bit better. However the maps has a different storage directory on the microSD card and not cleaning the old directory really wastes card space. In my case 470 MB of storage space! Here the full story:

Superfluous Mapdata

After the first installation I had problems with crashes on starting Maps were not seen. They all seemed be solved with using the latest maploader. However the map data is now stored into a different directory. If you did not clean the old directory before changing you should do this. I had a double copy of the Benelux and surrounding areas on my N95! Talk about circa 400 MB of wasted card space. The new map data is placed in the 'cities' directory on the microSD card. Switch your phone to mass storage mode,hook it up to you PC and clean the data in the hidden directory 'Private\20001f63'. This is where the mapdata for the previous Maps version is stored and it is no longer needed.

Stability and reliability

The new maps girl in my phone is just as blond as the previous one (non-digital ones excluded). She had the same routing errors or rather routing quirks. An experience driver would choose slightly different routes. Still she gets me where I want in the promised time. The new features all work well and reliable. Picking a destination without a GPS lock rocks and increases driving safety. No more embarissing geeky waiting-for-lock-moments, unimpressing the hot girl driving shotgun. Stability seems just as good, maybe even a bit better. None of the earlier problems like the mentioned tracking slowness in a turn etc. showed up any more. I had only two problems in the last weeks.

- Once the phone closed Maps to free memory when a call came in which I took. Normally it should keep Maps running. It was the only moment I got a call in the car during the last weeks. I had to restart Maps, luckily I save my destination always to an orientation point ;-) Still the previous version had the same problem occasional. So, nothing special.

- During heavy rainfall in a heavy tree covered road getting the GPS lock while driving took ages. So I parked the car to get a lock instead of continue driving in the wrong direction. The GPS fix was still a bit shaky under heavy and wet (GPS signal absorbing) treecover. Rainfall was pretty heavy, I had to slow down to prevent aquaplaning of the carwheels. Nothing unexpected though. AGPS really improved the locking and the older version might actually have had more problems.

Conclusions:

In general the new Maps is just as stabile and actually feels to be slightly more stabile than the previous one. No crashes at all, even during long drives. All the new features like the new search categories and map layout work flawless and are really an improvement. There is certainly room left for improvement, but Nokia seems to be bent on improving it. Surely many more versions of Nokia Maps will be released in the future. Especially now Nokia is interested in buying NavTeQ.

Nokia seems to be getting it, finally! But then they have to since Apple is getting into the competition. For now, I have my two most important features implemented. AGPS and selecting a navigation target without a GPS lock. The new search categories are actually a bonus. Altough I'd rather assign some numeric buttons to navigate to the nearest parking spot, fuel station, or back to the original path.

I had two little trips with the N95 last weekend. A great opportunity to roadtest the new Maps version and it stability. I reported earlier that I had two crashes with the software testing it at home and there were also some problems with the new maploader 1.2. All in all  I was a bit skittish taking it on the road while in company. But it performed very nicely.

Maploader problems.

Having been to Ireland for my vacation it seemed a good idea to free some space and reload my maps without Ireland on the memory card of the N95. Maps reloaded with maploader 1.2 would however not work with the new Map 1.0 on my N95. It crashed immediatly on startup. Verily annoyed I was supprised by the statement of maploader that there was an update available: 1.2.1. A map reload using maploader 1.2.1 works flawless with the new Maps 1.0. Once or twice I saw it crash while traversing some menus. But I have not seen it crashing during navigation.

Maps 1.0  performance

On friday I had my first trip of two times 1 hour navigating. Maps 1.0 worked nicely, no crashes. I did have some loss of the satellite signal where navigating intermittend. I have seem the problem occuring in the previous version before too. Wether this is cause by radio interference or buggy software is still unkown. There is some spot on the highway where satnav with an open sky is absent. Always the same spot. So sometimes it can be RFI. Caused by radar or radio.

On sunday I had a second trip and there it worked flawless, with the one exception that at one corner the application was a bit sluggish.  I rounded a curve to the right and it was lagging. Telling me to go right, where as I already was past the turn and needed to go immediatly left. Luckily I new the road.

I still love the cleanup of the menu structure and the improved search options. Time will tell if the application is improved in stability too. That's it for now.