Phone-Rush

Nokia Sports Tracker + GeoTagging + N95-4: A Few Observations

Last week I wasn't liking what I was seeing in the mirror, the bulge of fat around my stomach. From that time I've made a conscience effort to lose some weight. I did try using Nokia Sports Tracker before, but I never really dove into the features it offered, and abandoned it for a while. Since last week in my walks I've had it activated and occasionally set it to live stream my walk which could be followed on the Sports Tracker website. I also had the Location Tagger running in the background, and was taking pictures of any interesting sites or scenes during my walk. These photos being geotagged, it's an easy effort to upload them to the Sports Tracker website with the workout stats at the same time. Of course thanks to Mark he has a tutorial on how to embed this info from Sports Tracker on Google Maps. During the last week I've made a few observations and have some issues with the service which I hope can be ironed out for the next release of Sports Tracker.

1. In the path tracer on the applications, you can only see a trace of where you have walked so far. Where is the map that shows the streets? It can't be hard to put one there, even if it needs a data connection to retrieve it.

2. It would be great if an Auto Upload option is available so that my workouts get uploaded to the service right after I'm finished.

3. Right after the workout is over, I manually try to upload the workout to the service, and half the times it doesn't happen until I reboot the application.

4. When the workouts get uploaded, the pictures don't make it almost half the times. At all. Even when they do at times they aren't position correctly.

5. This might be related to the internal GPS of the N95-4 (or all N95s in general), but the speeds and altitudes have too much fluctuations in the readout on the application and on the website. Does anyone else have a problem with this? Is there more precision with an external bluetooth GPS?

6. It's relatively easy to import the Sportstracker info to Google maps. However in the process the geotagged photos on Sports Tracker don't make it through for some reason in the final map on Google Maps. This could be a glitch in the system or something wrong in the setup.

Still, this is a great application and service combined together, and it's a must have for any S60 and workout junkies.

[Photo: blogs.s60.com]

Q&A Session With Ovi Share Product Managers

Once again I'm back with another video interview we had at MWC in Barcelona, this time from the product managers of Ovi Share. For the duration of this Q&A we were standing along with the product managers at an inconvenient location in the Nokia press lounge, near the back kitchen. If you can ignore the people passing by frequently, you can get a good overview of what Ovi is all about. Of course as I use it more I'll be back with thoughts that I have about this service. Once again as with the recently posted videos, please forgive the shaking.

Index:
0:01 - Introduction and the philosophy of developing Ovi

1:19 - Different ways of media uploading and acessing Ovi

2:30 - Screenshot demo of a non-member and member homepage and a tour of it

3:29 - Screenshot demo of a member's channel and how it can be organized

4:18 - How non-Ovi members can view and contribute to a person's channel

5:54 - Screenshot demo of the media page and a brief tour of it

6:09 - Notification of newly uploaded media to a contact's channel

7:16 - Size and/or time limitations of uploads to Ovi

8:20 - Items on Ovi that are publicly indexed for search engines

9:07 - Support for licenses such as Creative Commons

9:54 - About uploading copyrighted material to Ovi

11:46 - RSS feeds and widget support

12:42 - Using Ovi for online colabaration purposes

13:52 - Brief on comments system and following a user's favorites

14:21 - Utilization of APIs and credential poilicies

15:27 - Ovi's mobile website

16:12 - Ovi's S60 application and its features

19:25 - About one click upload

20:13 - Adding meta data straight from the mobile client

22:48 - If RSS feeds will be supported in Ovi

23:45 - About uploading content in the background

23:57 - More about Ovi Share 3.0

Are you using Ovi? How do you like it? Feel free to drop a line below.

Free App Friday 12/7/07: Papyrus for Symbian S60

Handango is at it once again! Last time I got one of their free application on a Friday was LCG Jukebox and I'm using non-stop. This week it is Papyrus for S60, it's basically an enhanced calendar which allows more functionality than the default built-in calendar. You can see a review by Ewan from AAS. So jump on to this link and grab your free copy, but hurry, the link is valid only for today.

Call Filter... Again Why Isn't This Integrated?

Via an email that was sent out early yesterday, S60.com included Call Filter by m-internet.com with a free license. I was very stoked about this application, because I've been on the look out for solutions that include whitelists as well as blacklists for quite some time. The closest thing on S60 v3.1 that tries to act as a call filter is the call restriction buried deep in the settings menu, and rejects calls in bulk, not by type of caller or a specific individual. So back to the Call Filter application, setting up the application is a little bit confusing at the beginning, but let me walk you through the different options:

First off in the main menu there are 3 choices. First is the choice to make the app Auto run when the phone boots to life. Pretty straight forward. The third option is also pretty simple, allowing you to block people who have blocked their number or when caller ID can't resolve the number (like international calls). However all of the action takes place in the second choice, offering you a variety of options to filter through calls based on your preference.

The Rundown Of Google Maps 1.70.2

Google Maps was updated about a week ago, and the biggest addition to it was support for either external bluetooth GPS or integrated GPS. This is my most used app, due to my continuous driving situation I'm on right now, and it's searching and traffic display are impressive for the most part. I've been switching back and forth between my E61i + External BT GPS and my N95-3 using the integrated AGPS. I've been trying to use different aspects of it as much as possible in both scenarios, and these are what stand out for me: