Geotrailing with Live Search Mobile

On many domestic and international flights you can see on the TV monitor the gradual progress of the plane as it moves little by little across a map of the world. Out of curiosity, I wanted to know whether you can do something similar with my HTC Trinity phone, using the GPS facility to make a visual record with aerial photos of a route as I was taking it. I didn't have any particular purpose in mind, though I thought that to start I should try out something locally, in Oxford.

I'm still new to GPS and so far had largely just used it to plot a basic trail of GPS co-ordinates and take a few photos recording such details as EXIF data. However, I was soon introduced to mobile mapping software, notably Map24 Mobile , Google Maps Mobile and Microsoft Live Search for mobile devices. Google Maps and Live search both make use of satellite photos and can communicate with GPS receivers, so both looked promising candidates. So which one to choose? They makes use of different satellite data and in some areas Google has higher resolution photos and vice versa. In the case of Oxford, the Microsoft offering has far more detailed images, so I gave Live Search a go.

It sounds relatively simple - assuming you can get a GPS lock on your current location, you just need to ensure that maps are available as you go wandering. The mobile tools helpfully have cache facilities and I set Windows Live to its maximum of 8MB storage and started tracing a route in advance. However, care is needed about the areas you record and the zoom level - start off in the wrong area and/or wrong zoom and you might not see anything! To be safe, at least for a novice navigator like myself, I think you need to have Net access on demand. In the UK there's a good offer for general Net usage called 'Web n walk' available from T-Mobile . I took advantage of the free pay as you go SIM offer. There is very good coverage in Oxford, even for HSDPA

However, as far as I can tell the mapping software don't record your progress, they do not 'film' the steps you make or the path that unfolds, so I needed to find a screen recording utility. I had already made use of some screen capture tools such as Pocket Screen Capture to take snapshots of individual screens, but here I needed to find something that could conveniently record a sequence. Initially, all I could find were tools that required a connection with a desktop PC, which would use a remote viewer in conjunction with screen capture facilities on the PC itself. However, that wouldn't be much use on my travels (unless I wanted to lug a laptop with me!) After a while, I came across an excellent survey by Werner Ruotsalainen, who maintains an informative blog for Smartphone & Pocket PC Magazine.

It was through this survey that I found SuperSnap and in the quick tests that I set it worked exceedingly well, so I bought a copy.

Thus I was all set and yesterday provided a great opportunity to give it a whirl - a day out to Great Malvern to go walking on the hills :-) I set off and headed towards the canal, but indications pointed to some obstacles...

Undaunted I made my way and got to the canal and after some fiddling about, managed to get a GPS lock, connect, and start recording ... et voilà!

If you click on the image then it should load the animation on top (will need to wait a while as it is 700K file), but if that doesn't work, you can view the animation separately.

So why did I opt for SuperSnap? Well, apart from having a timer and allowing you to save as BMP or JPEG (variable compression), it has a special function that takes a copy of the screen every time it changes and it appears to do this cleanly and efficiently, fast enough for multiple updates a second. At work, I can see that it will be ideal for recording screens for instructions on using various software, setting configurations etc. I think it's well worth the $9.95 price tag.

However, the sequence is captured as a series of individual files and there is no animation option. In order to produce an animation, I needed the assistance of my desktop PC (bit disappointing for a mobile enthusiast ;-) I used Irfanview to do a batch conversion to GIFs and then imported them into MS GIF Animator, a rather old package that used to come with MS Frontpage 98!

Ideally, I would like to see a couple of other options introduced in SuperSnap - the first is an option to save screens as GIFs, though I expect its viability depends upon the amount of processing overhead and secondly, an option to export sequences as some animation or video file, but perhaps that is being rather too optimistic :-)

I subsequently tried the same activity on the train and it was good, as far as it went... just a few metres down the track and I lost the GPS lock, a little further down the line and the connection was no longer HSDPA or 3G, but GPRS. There's evidently some way to go before it becomes simple and dependable. Even so, it works in principle and I'm sure it'll be commonplace soon.

No excuses for getting lost with HTC P3600 ROM Upgrade :-)

As mentioned in my previous post on PDA and phone convergence, the HTC P3600 that I purchased has in its circuit board a GPS receiver, but it was not enabled in my version of the phone. During the past weeks I had been scouring the Web for signs of an official ROM update that might include this. The Asian version (for the Dopod equivalent) had been released in February, but the European version was slow to emerge until news spread via sites like XDA Developers of the official WorldWide English (WWE) release becoming available in a few countries such as Belgium, Sweden and then Italy.

So where was the ROM for UK users? It was a bit odd - I had read of people's queries to their HTC sellers with generally noncommittal responses. Wanting some clarification of the situation, on Tuesday (3rd) I got in touch with Smartphones Direct, the company that had sold me my phone, using their Java-based online chat facility. I asked about the availability of the HTC Rom update to include GPS and at that time was informed that it wasn't available and that even an official ROM download would invalidate the warranty, but there was the possibility of the company installing it for me for a fee.

Disappointed, I was wondering what to do. However, I kept dipping into online fora and the next day I was encouraged by a thread on the Expansys site. It was great news - an official ROM to download from HTC Europe's site. I proceeded to download and was expecting to install straightaway, but I hit a snag - I had left the sync cable in the office and the next day I was on leave and due to be travelling in the afternoon! Never mind. This morning I popped into the office, collected the cable en route to a bit of shopping, then raced back home and carried out the upgrade and it was fine.

Naturally, I was keen to try out the GPS. I see they have since added TomTom Navigator as a freebie, but I was travelling by train this afternoon, so instead I installed VisualGSPCE. Having never used GPS before, I don't know what to expect, but I find this a very nice piece of software that is easy to use and provides very clear details of your co-ordinates (longitude and latitude are very accurate, but altitude seems to fluctuate quite a bit more) plus your velocity. It also shows some stats about the satellites - how many around, how many are being used (have strong enough signal). After installation, I found I needed to do a restart of the PDA and initially it gave an error because by default it was expecting communications to be on COM1; changing (via the app) to COM9 enables it to work. From then on it's a doddle!

My colleague Matthew had alerted me to an article in The Register in which they had tested the GPS in the Orange SPV M700 (rebadged HTC P3600) and they had found it drained the battery as much as talk time, i.e. to about 4.5 hours. One of my other colleagues has the Orange phone and had already tried the GPS; I haven't got round to asking him about battery life, but I think his ROM is dated January and since then I've read very positive remarks about improvements in this area in later ROMs (the HTC WWE one is from March).

So I ran a test. Just before my train arrived I switched on the phone, got a lock (within a minute) and left it on for the duration of the journey. VisualGPSce has a logging facility, which I remembered to switch on just after we had left the station. I then kept the PDA on (with non-backlit display) for the duration of the journey, which was 3 1/4 hours. So did it last the distance? At the start it was at 90% and by the end of that period, it had 50% battery left, which means only about 40% was used in that duration, which also included 3 quick calls and a 1 minute video shoot. All in all, quite impressive, I think!

There are quite a number of features in the ROM Upgrade that are worthy of mention, including support for receiving streaming video. However, now at my destination, I have about 2MB of GPS log to peruse... :-)