Richard's Tech Reviews

CNet reviews Nokia 6210 Navigator GPS phone

I don't have a car, so driving navigation features are useless to me.  I found that the Mio H610, even though it's called the "DigiWalker", was not great as a pedestrian navigator - lacking a compass, I followed its guidance and ended up walking quite a few blocks past my actual destination, going in the wrong direction.

GPS also suffers particularly in exactly the urban canyon environment where I'm likely to want walking directions; the A-GPS offered in some cellphones (including the 6210) can help with this.

Navigadget points me to an interesting CNet review of the Nokia 6210 Navigator, testing it as a pedestrian navigation device.  Although it takes quite a detour in the middle, overall the review is quite informative.

The updated Maps 2.0 service and 6210 Navigator, which were both announced at the GSMA Mobile World Congress here this week, essentially take navigation out of the car and put it into the hands of people like me, who spend most of their time walking rather than driving.

...

It's not just the navigation that makes Maps 2.0 and the 6210 Navigator a perfect device for travelers. It also comes with lots of useful information. On each city map, Nokia has indicated points of interest, such as tourist sites and restaurants. You can click on the mapped icons to set your destination or get more information, such as a phone number or address.

In addition to this map information, which is free, Nokia also offers city guides written by travel guide publishers for about $12 apiece that provide even more detailed restaurant and hotel recommendations, as well as audio and video tours. The Navigator 6210 also comes with a decent 3.2-megapixel camera, so you don't even have to lug a separate camera around.

CNet - Mapping medieval streets using GPS - February 14, 2008

Nokia Beta Labs has a download of Maps 2.0 beta available.

There is of course no 6210 info on the Canadian Nokia site, but the full product site is up in Europe

http://europe.nokia.com/A4835121 - Nokia 6210 Navigator

There is unfortunately no indication of automatically geocoding photos, but presumably this is part of their strategy for whatever final software and changes come out of the Location Tagger project.

Note: The 6210 Navigator replaces the 6110 Navigator.  These models are more specifically navigation focussed than say the N95, which also includes GPS features.

Phone image from Nokia Media Resources

Qstarz announces BT-Q1000P (Platinum)

• The BT-Q1000 Platinum is fitted with the MTK chipset which gives a fast and accurate signal with its 51 channels performance.               

• The efficient battery consumption allows 32 hours of use between charges.

• Increased memory capacity allows you to record up to 200,000 waypoints.

 

The provided software has numerous features

• Simple user interface - Just three easy steps to geo-tag a photo.

• Track split and track edit - easy to manage your trip folder.

• Flicker and Google Earth integration - share your trip experience with others quickly.

• Photo Preview & Slide Show function - keep track of every “ moment”

• Analyse speed and altitude---Bring more fun for your trip.

• Two software modes - standard user and power user.                  

The QSTARZ BT-Q1000 Platinum will be available from 15th of February 2008.

Qstarz News - QSTARZ Launches the GPS Travel Recorder Platinum version - February 5, 2008

This is an enhancement to the BT-Q1000, with more storage and much enhanced software.  This will be a nice step up, as the current software requires you to manually split tracks in e.g. an Excel spreadsheet.

Be aware that there is no standard for counting waypoint records.  For the BT-Q1000, they count waypoints that can be stored with position only, which doesn't include altitude.  If you enable altitude and other fields, the available record storage drops to about 40,000 points.  (I will have a posting on this coming up.)

Review of BT-Q1000P to follow.

Disclosure: BT-Q1000P information provided by Qstarz Public Relations.

UPDATE 2008-02-19: It's now available for online purchase.  I'm hoping to have a review out by next week.

camera GPS - Airwave1

"There's no doubt we'll see cameras with built-in GPS within the next two years, possibly sooner," said Chuck Westfall, technical adviser for the professional products marketing division at Canon, the world's largest camera maker. "The desirability of that feature is quite clear."

CNet News.com - Underexposed Blog - Cameras with built-in geotagging on horizon - February 12, 2008

Above blog posting talks a lot about Air Semiconductor's Airwave1, the product site says

Airwave1 is a complete GPS L1 receiver and it is the first product to benefit from Air’s Always-On™ GPS technology.

Airwave1 is designed to support geotagging in digital cameras. To support this application, location information needs to be provided instantly when the user takes a photograph. With Airwave1 inside, the camera is continuously aware of its location

According to the Underexposed posting, it does this by continuously running in a low power

it goes into a low-power mode, even when the camera is off, that keeps track of its position with a very rough accuracy of about 100 meters

The posting also discusses the Geotate technology and the (apparently unconfirmed) possibility of it showing up in September in the E1050 (as a second model maybe, which would explain why the E1050 documentation says "optional GPS accessory").

via Geotagging Flickr group

Previously:
February 2, 2008  Jobo and Geotate digital camera GPS approaches

a disagreement about dates

Man, every time you think something's going to be simple.

The Qstarz application produces CSV files.
In Canada and Europe, the date format is day/month/year
In the US, it's month/day/year

So for February 3, my CSV looks like

   

DATE

03/02/2008

but when I upload this to GPS visualizer .com to convert to CSV (since RoboGEO doesn't seem to like the NMEA that the Qstarz app produces), it comes back

<time>2008-03-02T17:12:53Z</time>

So of course there's no RoboGEO match for my photos.

So I had to manually refill the spreadsheet with

   

DATE

02/03/2008

and re-run it through GPS Visualizer.

YouTube mapping

YouTube has rather awkward mapping integration.
Here's what I did:

1. geocoded photos using Qstarz track converted to GPX, K790 photos, and RoboGEO
2. got the location of a photo taken just before my video from Google Earth (from the Properties of the mapped image)
3. entered the lat/long into the "Search" box for YouTube map settings (there is no help for the map settings that I could find, so I just had to experiment)

(You may need to click "Update Video Info", it's not clear.)  Once you set the map coordinates for your video... well, you can't actually do anything with that info inside of YouTube.  No Google Maps link.  No Google Earth export.  You have to wait for the video to automagically show up in the Google Earth layer (Layers - Primary Database->Gallery->YouTube).  If you embed the video, there is no geographic information associated with it.  If you go back into "Date & Map Options", it won't even show you the video location on the map by default.  Weak.

According to Google Earth Blog, the YouTube layer is updated daily, so I will check back tomorrow to see if my vid shows up.

UPDATE 2008-02-17: Well it's now over a week later, and even though Edit My Video says "Date & Map settings have been set", there's still no sign of it in the YouTube layer.