Richard's Tech Reviews

CNN GPS trackers put reporters on the map

On Campbell Brown's show they just displayed a new map feature: reporter current locations, and locations over time.  I assumed that they were doing this by the reporters manually entering their position but to my surprise they said the correspondents are actually wearing GPS trackers - John King used the "magic map" and zoomed in right to a specific building in New York (using images from Google Earth I think) to show exactly where he was.

I was hoping the feature would be available on the map

http://cnn.com/map

but I don't see it.

I've contacted CNN and I will let you know if they provide more info, or if there's a transcript or video available.

(Note: A GPS tracker is a device that provides a live position update for e.g. display on a map, usually by combining a GPS receiver with a cellphone for location transmission.)

UPDATE 2008-10-31: The transcript is now available (highlighting mine)

BROWN: Oh, certainly one to watch. John, finally, you're at magic wall. I know you have a new toy to tell us about, a new way apparently to keep track of our best political team on television. Show it to us.

KING: We don't call them toys, now, Campbell. We call them important pieces of information.

(LAUGHTER)

BROWN: OK.

KING: Let's look at this now.

This is a corresponding tracker. All right here, you see our correspondents who are all around the country. You see, I'm right here in New York right here. I am going to spread out Ohio, because it's not just Dana Bash in Ohio. It's Mary Snow. And we will bring it out a little bit further. You just spoke to Ed Henry. All our correspondents are everywhere.

I'm going to shrink the map down a little bit. Look at how significant this is. Suzanne is down here. Dan Lothian and Jessica Yellin are over here in the state of Virginia. Look at where they are. They're all in red states, Campbell. These are states George W. Bush won last time, Dan Simon out in Colorado, the Election Express waiting for Wolf Blitzer and the Barack Obama interview in Des Moines tomorrow.

Candy Crowley in Missouri. We saw Dana up here in New York. We have, not only John King, but Jim Acosta. He's hiding behind me. I won't stretch that out any further. Quite significant.

Here's what we can do. We can track everybody over the past week. I am going to step across the camera and come back here. Now, watch the names on the wall. This is where everybody was a week ago. Well, everybody has a bit of a week moving around. You see everybody going.

Or you can do it this way, Campbell, if you want to see it. We can track them, go back a week, and move these lines this way. Looks like an airline grid. And here's the lucky one. If you want to pick a correspondent who has had the best last week, Suzanne Malveaux in Atlanta. She was in Florida. And if you follow her line all the way across, it gets you to Hawaii. That's not so bad.

(LAUGHTER)

BROWN: So, what, do we, like, embed GPS or something in their heads? How do you know where they are at all time, John?

(CROSSTALK)

KING: They are carrying around small devices, including me. And watch how well this works. I am going to go to the Google Map feature and stretch this out. They are carrying around little GPS devices.

BROWN: Yes.

KING: There, you see Jim Acosta. Now, look, here's Columbus Circle. You know where we are, Campbell. We are right here in the Time Warner Center.

BROWN: That is creepy. Like, what if somebody wants to go to a bar late at night and doesn't want you and I to go, like, where is Jim Acosta? He's at the bar down the street. He's supposed to be covering the campaign. This could get ugly. I don't know about this technology.

(CROSSTALK)

KING: You take the little button, and you turn it off.

(LAUGHTER)

BROWN: All right. John King, this is going to be fun. We are going to be playing with this over the next couple of days. John, we will see you in a little bit.

TVA Test JE - GPS in the forest

The French show JE has a test segment, in the latest one they had a hiking club compare three handheld GPSes.

Contrairement à la boussole, en forêt, le GPS va vous informer des obstacles que vous allez rencontrer : lac, ruisseau, etc. Et il n'est pas très difficile à utiliser.

The video is available at

http://medias.tva.ca/emissions/je/tests/26406.wmv

Nokia N82 with TV out and keyboard

The Nokia N82 comes with a cable for composite TV-out, plus stereo audio.  It will even rotate the on-screen display automatically, just as it does on the phone (although this appeared not to work in some cases).

When combined with a Bluetooth keyboard, this makes a very usable mobile computing platform,  as the phone also has built-in WiFi.  I can imagine it replacing a laptop in some cases.  The display is clear and sharp.  For it to be a truly usable travel platform e.g. for working in your hotel room, you would need to ensure a TV that has composite in though.  As more hotels provide advanced flatscreens, this may become less of an issue.

I'm writing this review using the technology right now.  N82 with provided TV-out cable, Dell W2600 LCD flatscreen with composite-in, and iGo Ultra-Slim Bluetooth Keyboard.

After entering all the text, I will have to go on my computer and add in the photos and links, I haven't tested how much of that is possible and easy using TypePad Mobile.

I'm using the N73 keyboard driver from the iGo support site (it takes many layers of clicks to find it).  There is no official N82 driver but the N73 Stowaway Universal one works fine.

http://www.mobilityelectronics.com/support/Drivers.asp?ManufacturerID=22&ModelID=483

The keyboard is quite usable, the keys are pretty much full-sized and in the regular layout.  You need to use function keys to access numbers, the keyboard only has the three rows of letters plus a function/spacebar row.  There is a Bluetooth keyboard driver available from Nokia (mostly to support Nokia's own keyboard offering) but it doesn't provide all the necessary functions - whereas with the iGo driver I can access the left phone selection item with the "windows" key on the keyboard, or with left Fn and the left side of the spacebar if I need to select, similarly left  Fn + right spacebar for the right function selection, Fn+K for the main screen, and Fn+C for the "menu" of applications.  Fn+Enter functions when you need to make an on-screen selection.  These are all marked on the keys.

I looked into adding a Bluetooth mouse, but these are not supported.  Not really necessary since you can just use the up/down/left/right arrows on the keyboard.

The keyboard folds up in to a portable, closed case.

In addition to dedicated apps like the TypePad Mobile example shown at the top of this posting, you can also just use the built-in web browser and apps like the mobile version of Twitter.

I wish apps actually gave more control over fonts, as the browser display you can see fits a lot more text than the TypePad Mobile screen, and even that app shows more text on its status screen

Overall I think the cellphone using WiFi plus TV-out with Bluetooth keyboard make quite a usable mobile solution.  The keyboard does also have a stand so that you can use the N82 propped up in front of the keyboard, but I think that would be a lot less usable for anything more than very brief messages.

UPDATE 2008-03-22: Apologies for the multi-postings, apparently every time I sent from TypePad Mobile and it told me the send failed, it was actually queuing [] it up somewhere.  Images and links to follow later today have now been added.  ENDUPDATE