Subscribe to RSS
Posts Tagged ‘gps’
Update on my eComm presentation
This has not made it to the eComm site yet, but here’s what my 5-minute lightning talk will be about:
Mobile phones are practically ubiquitous. Everyone carries them and most of them are turned on and connected 24×7. Today’s mobile phones, even the least expensive ones, have sensors, spare cycles, and connectivity. These resources can be applied to a wide variety of Social Telemetry Applications, to powerful, and potentially even troubling, effect. We present findings of a real-world deployment of such a system.
And here’s a sneak-peak of the talk:
eComm presentation Wednesday, March 4, 4:55PM Salon E
I look forward to seeing you there.
S60 Google Maps on N95 Rocks
I my recent post “N95 GPS Revisited”, I mentioned that I’d be trying and reporting on the new native Symbian S60 version of Google Maps as an alternative to the pre-loaded Nokia mapping application.
Well, in short, the Google app blows the Nokia one away, IMHO. It finally makes the GPS function of the N95 useful and totally changes this phone for me.
Quick Overview
The Google application integrates with the N95 GPS hardware and it shows your current location as a blue dot on the map. You can jump to your current location at any point using the 0 (zero) key. The 1 key zooms out and the 3 key zooms in.
The search function has been amazingly impressive in finding the right location with a small amount of text entry (even with misspellings). It must use the GPS position to make a lot of assumptions about what one is looking for, prioritizing local places, and so on.
Click ‘Directions’ and you get a ‘Route overview’ screen showing the step-by-step turns. Click ‘Show’ and the route is shown on the map. You can move from step to step with the 4 (Prev) and 6 (Next) keys.
Hit 0 and you go to your current location (with the route still overlaid on the map) and then press 6 to go back to the ‘route’ again. Even when in ‘route’ mode, your current location is shown live, moving on the map, at the same time as the ‘route’ overlay. This feature alone is a tremendous improvement in usability over the pre-loaded Nokia Maps app.
You can do other stuff like show traffic (for selected areas) and show a satellite view if you prefer (although it’s more data, so it can slow things down). As a native S60 app, it doesn’t use as much RAM as something like the Java-based Yahoo Go 2.0 app. It also integrates with Contacts and Web in nifty ways.
The speed of the app is pretty much dependent on your Internet connection speed. Also, all the maps all come in over the data connection, which may impact your bill if you don’t have an unlimited data plan.
In summary, this is the best mobile phone GPS app for practical use in driving that I’ve seen yet and really improves the value of the N95.
N95 GPS Revisited
I previously have written about the N95 GPS in August 2007: My love/hate relationship with the N95 GPS .
Since that time, Nokia has released new software that improves the utility of the GPS significantly. Opinions vary about the N95 GPS, as can be seen from the comments on the above post. However, the fundamental flaw back then was that it took so long to get a fix (to figure out where you/it are), that it was effectively useless.
With N95 firmware version 20.0.015 that problem has been corrected. The N95 now gets a fix within the same time as dedicated GPS devices from Garmin, Magellan etc. That means it’s usually nearly instant, or within one minute (It can be longer in rare cases).
So with that problem behind us, I recently had an opportunity to spend time with the N95 GPS again, in real-world driving situations (i.e. when I actually wanted to know how to get from point A to point B). Here are few highlights:
- Never use the GPS yourself while driving – let a passenger use it to help guide you. if you’re alone, pull over, check out the maps, and then drive again.
- The N95 will now create a “route” (driving directions) from Point A to Point B, without requiring any additional purchases.
- Turn-by-turn “navigation” (spoken real-time navigation) is optional and must be purchased on a subscription or pay-per-use basis – I did not test/try this and, therefore, I can’t comment on it further.
- While the driving directions (routes) seem accurate enough, they are difficult to use. I could not figure out how to display both the route and my real-time position on a map at the same time, which kind of defeats the purpose of having GPS.
- The point of interest database is very incomplete and, as a result, its practical utility is limited.
I think I still have a love/hate relationship with the GPS. The love is better, but the hate is still there, albeit to a much lesser degree than with previous versions of the N95 mapping software. Perhaps something that best captures the state of the N95 GPS is that, in real-life situations, I found times when it was “easier” to load Google Maps on the laptop, manually figure out where we were, use Google Maps to create a “static” route to where we wanted to go, and then follow that, rather than use the live, real-time GPS and routing of the N95.
Next time I’m going to try the S60 version of Google Maps, which now comes as a native S60 version that runs directly on the N95 and uses the built-in N95 GPS hardware, to see if it works better than the standard N95 mapping application.
UPDATE: Check out my mini-review of the native S60 Google Maps application: S60 Google Maps on N95 Rocks
My love/hate relationship with the N95 GPS
I have a fair amount of experience with GPS devices, going back over more than 10 years. My first device was an Eagle Explorer (I still have it) and I’ve used countless GPS systems since. I also developed a GPS-based vehicle tracking system. So I can speak with some authority on the technology.
Compared head-to-head with modern dedicated GPS devices, the Nokia N95 falls well short. The drawback that surprises me the most is the time it takes to get a fix. This is of course an area where early GPS devices were highly criticized, so it was a key area of research over the years and is now rather well known technology. Nokia seems to be back in the 90’s with the basic ability to obtain and keep a fix. Typical time seems to be about 10 to 15 minutes whereas a modern dedicated GPS typically gets an initial fix (the first time you turn it on) within 5 minutes and subsequent fixes within 2-3 minutes (often far less).
That said, the N95 is not a dedicated GPS device – it is a cell phone. As a cell phone, it is a pretty nifty GPS device. Let’s put aside the matter of the length of time it takes to get a fix and focus on the GPS once it has a fix (although this alone often makes the GPS worthless, since you are already where you want to be, or hopelessly lost, by the time the N95 GPS is ready to use). The N95 pulls maps down over the air (using your data conection), so without an unlimited data plan, you might want to steer clear of the GPS feature. It also means the N95 is useless as a GPS for hiking or use anywhere that you cannot get a data connection. On the other hand, it means you do not need to have a lot of internal memory for maps, use CDs/DVDs, or pre-load specific maps for a specific region. As a device that pulls map data in dynamically as needed, it is one of the slickest I’ve used. The user interface in general, however, is difficult to use, a bit slow, and missing many features of a real dedicated GPS. Things like waypoints, routes, track-logs and such are nowhere to be found.
On the other hand, if you are lost, and the N95 is all you have (and you can get a data connection), it’s a godsend, even if a horrendously frustrating one. What I found particularly frustrating is that the N95 requires you to subscribe to a “service’” to receive navigation capabilities. You can search for a location on the device, but if you click ‘navigate’ you get a screen requiring purchase. In practice, this purchase experience is very awkward so I have never actually purchased it. It felt like the phone was running an extortion scheme, saying “buy this or get car-jacked when you get lost in the wrong neighborhood.” Supposedly, you can buy one week for about $10 or three years for about $100, and it works. But I wouldn’t know, and here’s why: It’s not a good enough GPS to justify using it all the time as a replacement for a “real” GPS (which provides navigation without any additional fee). If the rest of the GPS features worked really well, and if the purchase experience were simpler, and clearer, I might be a bit more inclined. But there still is this fundamental hurdle that those of us that have used GPS systems for years have come to expect navigation to be a feature of a product, not a service we subscribe to.
The one-week navigation subscription is probably worth it, if you are really stuck somewhere and perhaps sometime I’ll try it and report on it. Without it, what you have is a live map that shows your position in real-time. That’s a pretty clunky way to navigate, and certainly not something a driver should try to alone – leave it to a passenger.
As a close to this post, to illustrate further the love/hate nature of my experience with the N95 GPS, I have used the GPS to help get “un-lost” and for that I’m grateful for it, but it has also crashed (the entire phone) mid-navigation which really screwed me up. So there. 
