Re: Google Maps Navigation takes a mobile turn
That really works? I've been rocking mobile navigation for a couple years with Ovi Maps (formerly Nokia Maps), and more recently waze. The first is excellent, the latter very promising. I understand that Ovi Maps is not quite ready for primetime on the N900. Maybe one of the reasons they postponed the launch? K On Wed, Oct 28, 2009 at 9:10 PM, Mark Haury wolfm...@gmail.com wrote: http://news.cnet.com/8301-30684_3-10384544-265.html?tag=nl.e703 Finally, a navigation solution for handhelds that really works. As soon as T-Mobile comes out with an Android 2.0 phone that I like, it's sayonara to the piece of crap TomTom I bought a couple of months ago (I'm on the third unit with a defective battery and am not going to bother sending this one in - I'll replace the battery myself - but that's just scratching the surface of all the horrible design problems. I incorrectly assumed that TomTom had been around long enough to figure out how to make a gpsr, but I should have stuck with Garmin) as well as my Nokia tablet that never really did anything well and is now dying an ugly death due to corrupt and probably failing internal flash memory. Maybe this will force the standalone gps manufacturers to bring the map update prices down to something approaching reasonable. Or even run them all out of business, which they so richly deserve after all these years of highway robbery. 95% of the map data they get for free from governments and other free and public sources, at least 4% of it is corrections from their own consumers who have paid dearly for maps, and _maybe_ 1% of it is obtained in-house. And since at least 95% of any given map update is identical to the old map, it's absurd to assert that they have any real financial investment in it. It's a racket very like the printer manufacturers who sell some printers near and sometimes even below cost, but make such extremely high profit margins on the ink and toner that they could give the printers away for free and it wouldn't make any difference. Can you say at least 6000% profit?!?!? (Except the GPS manufacturers are making a very healthy profit on the hardware as well.) Mark ___ maemo-users mailing list maemo-users@maemo.org https://lists.maemo.org/mailman/listinfo/maemo-users -- In Vino Veritas http://rubbernecking.info ___ maemo-users mailing list maemo-users@maemo.org https://lists.maemo.org/mailman/listinfo/maemo-users
Re: Google Maps Navigation takes a mobile turn
On Thu, Oct 29, 2009 at 11:54 AM, Kevin T. Neely ktne...@astroturfgarden.com wrote: That really works? I've been rocking mobile navigation for a couple years with Ovi Maps (formerly Nokia Maps), and more recently waze. The first is excellent, the latter very promising. I understand that Ovi Maps is not quite ready for primetime on the N900. Maybe one of the reasons they postponed the launch? K The Wayfinder Map app that came on the N8x0 is excruciatingly painful to use for actual navigation. The map data (at least in my area of the USA) is extremely out of date, and the POI database is severely lacking. You can't load the whole country at once, only the western or eastern half, and if you're traveling across the dividing line it couldn't be any less user-friendly. You can't have more than one map active at a time, so even though you can add maps at will, navigating between any two of them is impossible. Trying to enter a destination is an exercise in futility. If you manually pan the map and place a favorite and use that for your destination the directions are pretty good and the voice prompts are excellent, but there are so many obstacles to getting to that point that the app is pretty much useless for anything but showing you where you currently are. Plus, the app as shipped is crippled to only show your current location - if you want navigation you have to pay as much as a whole standalone navigation device, but you don't get the stability or any of the other strengths of the standalone devices. All of the other navigation apps for the tablets are works in progress and none of them natively do routing. Navit claims to, but if it does they've certainly hidden that functionality well. RoadMap does rudimentary routing, but you have to create the route manually. If you can't do routing, then you can't do navigation... Neither Ovi nor waze is available for the tablets, and if Ovi is the phone version of the tablet Map app that it appears to be, I'm less than impressed. You do have to pay extra to get navigation and it more than likely uses the same map data. Waze does indeed seem very promising, but again they are duplicating much of what OpenStreetMap has been working on for years, and everybody would benefit much more if they would integrate their technology with OSM instead of striking out on their own. OSM already has a huge amount of map data, but the user interface is a PITA and they would greatly benefit from an app exactly like waze. I don't own a smartphone, but Android 2.0 may be what changes my mind on the matter. Even if I could afford an N900 I wouldn't risk it at this point. Maybe if they are still being produced and supported in 2 or 3 years I'll consider it. My mobile mapping experience thus far has been with PDA, Tablet and Laptop map/navigation software, and I have yet to find an application - even the expensive ones - for any of those that is in the same league as even the worst standalone GPSr. The usability of even my piece of junk TomTom is light years beyond anything I've tried that wasn't a dedicated unit. Mark ___ maemo-users mailing list maemo-users@maemo.org https://lists.maemo.org/mailman/listinfo/maemo-users
Re: Google Maps Navigation takes a mobile turn
Ovi Maps uses Navteq maps. The engine is different from the mapping application on the N8x0 series tablets. On Thu, Oct 29, 2009 at 12:13 PM, Mark wolfm...@gmail.com wrote: On Thu, Oct 29, 2009 at 11:54 AM, Kevin T. Neely ktne...@astroturfgarden.com wrote: That really works? I've been rocking mobile navigation for a couple years with Ovi Maps (formerly Nokia Maps), and more recently waze. The first is excellent, the latter very promising. I understand that Ovi Maps is not quite ready for primetime on the N900. Maybe one of the reasons they postponed the launch? K The Wayfinder Map app that came on the N8x0 is excruciatingly painful to use for actual navigation. The map data (at least in my area of the USA) is extremely out of date, and the POI database is severely lacking. You can't load the whole country at once, only the western or eastern half, and if you're traveling across the dividing line it couldn't be any less user-friendly. You can't have more than one map active at a time, so even though you can add maps at will, navigating between any two of them is impossible. Trying to enter a destination is an exercise in futility. If you manually pan the map and place a favorite and use that for your destination the directions are pretty good and the voice prompts are excellent, but there are so many obstacles to getting to that point that the app is pretty much useless for anything but showing you where you currently are. Plus, the app as shipped is crippled to only show your current location - if you want navigation you have to pay as much as a whole standalone navigation device, but you don't get the stability or any of the other strengths of the standalone devices. All of the other navigation apps for the tablets are works in progress and none of them natively do routing. Navit claims to, but if it does they've certainly hidden that functionality well. RoadMap does rudimentary routing, but you have to create the route manually. If you can't do routing, then you can't do navigation... Neither Ovi nor waze is available for the tablets, and if Ovi is the phone version of the tablet Map app that it appears to be, I'm less than impressed. You do have to pay extra to get navigation and it more than likely uses the same map data. Waze does indeed seem very promising, but again they are duplicating much of what OpenStreetMap has been working on for years, and everybody would benefit much more if they would integrate their technology with OSM instead of striking out on their own. OSM already has a huge amount of map data, but the user interface is a PITA and they would greatly benefit from an app exactly like waze. I don't own a smartphone, but Android 2.0 may be what changes my mind on the matter. Even if I could afford an N900 I wouldn't risk it at this point. Maybe if they are still being produced and supported in 2 or 3 years I'll consider it. My mobile mapping experience thus far has been with PDA, Tablet and Laptop map/navigation software, and I have yet to find an application - even the expensive ones - for any of those that is in the same league as even the worst standalone GPSr. The usability of even my piece of junk TomTom is light years beyond anything I've tried that wasn't a dedicated unit. Mark ___ maemo-users mailing list maemo-users@maemo.org https://lists.maemo.org/mailman/listinfo/maemo-users -- In Vino Veritas http://rubbernecking.info ___ maemo-users mailing list maemo-users@maemo.org https://lists.maemo.org/mailman/listinfo/maemo-users
Re: Google Maps Navigation takes a mobile turn
midoscentavos Maps and navigation aside, who originally published android.img.bz2 and android-installer.deb? More importantly, I wonder if Nokia's considered releasing and Android 2.0 version of the N900 but if not, how about the original Android porters? Everyone and their brother's cousin is jumping off the Windows Mobile ship and on to the Android platform for a multitude of reasons. In short they are 1) Windows Mobile is still Windows, 2) iPhone and WebOS are not available, and 3) they want an iPhone killer. Bottom line; competition and choice are good things. /midoscentavos ___ maemo-users mailing list maemo-users@maemo.org https://lists.maemo.org/mailman/listinfo/maemo-users
Re: N900 battery duration
Tuomas Kulve wrote: igor.sto...@nokia.com wrote: There is a bug in the cellmo SW related to absence of SIM: the current is higher when the SIM is not in. So in real life use case (i assume people who will buy it will actually use it as a phone) the use time will be longer. I guess I need to do more testing then :) Although I'm not sure how to accomplish that as I need my SIM for the daily use.. The previous test was without a SIM card. The device was very idle and run for 93.75 hours (with a guessed few hour error marginal). After charging the battery I inserted the SIM card, rebooted and started a new test. I received two calls (hung up immediately), I received two SMS messages and sent one, and the notifier led was blinking for 45 mins at one point. Otherwise the device was idle and run for 93.62 hours. So pretty close to the test without a SIM card. I have a small shell script running there that writes a log every 60 seconds. After writing the log it runs the sync command and starts the loop again. I'm assuming it doesn't affect the total run time much in an otherwise idle device. -- Tuomas ___ maemo-users mailing list maemo-users@maemo.org https://lists.maemo.org/mailman/listinfo/maemo-users
