Nokia

I see people. I see them say that they have given up on wearing fitness trackers and smartwatches because they hate the tyranny of the device. I have felt an intense dislike for Apple behaves in particular. At the same time I have been playing wit Sportstracker for eighteen years or so. My fitness tracking habit is old enough to drink and old enough to drive.

This isn’t a post about drinking, or driving. This is a post about having a healthy relationship with your Garmin Instinct 2, your Suunto Peak 5, your Apple Watch SE, your Xiaomi Smartband 9 Pro and many other devices over the decades. it’s about wearing them, without displaying addictive behaviours. It’s about co-existence.

On Wednesday I went to the Lac de Joux as the fog was lifting off the lake [flickr-gallery mode=“photoset” photoset=“72157628110677339”]

Today was a warm day. With a group of people we went to Leysin for a hike. Here are some pictures from the event. [flickr-gallery mode=“photoset” photoset=“72157628177774925”]

An Autumn walk at the foot of the Jura. It was earlier today as I was doing the later shift. [flickr-gallery mode=“photoset” photoset=“72157627857326021”]

Last night I recovered my N97 after lending it to a friend for a few days and he told me it was too complicated to use, which I do agree with, after seeing how easy the 3gs is, but that’s not the point of this post. Turn by turn navigation is. For those of you who know me you’ll have heard that I’ve used the N95, N97 and Iphone for navigation and each has it’s strengths and weaknesses. Mainly the biggest weakness is having to wait until you’re stopped at a traffic light before checking whether you were going the right way or not. That has now changed. Nokia have recently come out with an excellent, yes, that’s my opinion, add on to the maps software that provides turn by turn navigation with a choice of hundreds of voices. That’s what makes the Nokia N97 such a great, although expensive GPS. You select the voice, in my case female Canadian french, and she will tell you which way to go. She will tell you when you’re at a roundabout, whether to go right or left and more. Best of all her voice will allow you to keep your eyes on the road. If you’re travelling with a fellow geek who can play with the phone whilst you’re driving then they will notice the counting down, telling you how far you are from the next change in direction, show a map of the route as a forerunner to the actual journey or even a map of the complete journey. From what I’ve described above you see that the N97 behaves just like a dedicated navigation GPS that’s constantly online. As a result you get traffic information telling you what to look out for. It’s a beautiful piece of software and I’d love to go on a road trip to test it. I’m in favour of this in car navigation. If you buy a GPS you’d pay 300-400CHF in some cases, several hundred CHF for the Iphone tom-tom app, or you could get it for free with your N97. The choice is yours. I’m very happy with how well it performed.

Gravity is a twitter client for the s60 and I recently installed it on my N95 and so far I’m very happy with it. With an intuitive interface it makes being logged in to two twitter accounts and one identica account very easy. What is especially nice is that you select which account you want to look at and by scrolling left and right you see the friend’s timeline, the replies, your tweets, your DM and finally searches if you want. That’s automatic and for every account. It’s far better than the other twitter clients for s60 that I’ve tried so for the moment that is one twitter client I would recommend you use. I know what I’m talking about. I tweet from anywhere without it slowing down my social life. Also if you pay for this app after the ten day trial period you’re helping demonstrate that it’s not just the iphone which has people willing to pay for the applications

Bernard Goldbach - Feb 3, 2009

I am waiting for the upgrade that lets me mark myself as a point of interest, then let the POI become a contact in my address book that can be texted to someone’s GPS unit and appear as a valid navigation destination.

Couldn’t you send a kml with that data?

Yesterday I met a friend in geneva. The one that uses Google Latitude. I used my mobile phone to see where he was and just using cell towers I got a pretty good fix on where he was, within just a few hundred meters. When I called him to get a more accurate fix, i.e. for him to input the address as his latitude position using the power of Google maps, latitude and 3g it took just a minute to find the actual address. For this reason I love google latitude. When you’ve got technologically savvy users it makes being geo-loced twenty four hours a day extremely useful.

Any french speaker knows this frustration. You see that a new service is available to Switzerland, drop by the site and everything is in German. Google latitude is in German and hundreds of other sites too. The most recent site to suffer from this curse is Nokia music, recently made available in Switzerland. It would seem that those in charge of marketing in Switzerland believe that people in Switzerland only speak German. French speakers exist too, and so do the Italian speakers. As web content creators maybe it’s time for you to offer us the services in French so that we may use them. Will companies providing services in Switzerland ever realise we’re not all German speakers? That remains to be seen. Nokia music, you’ve lost my interest.

warzabidul - Feb 5, 2009

You can select to specify where you are by city and country if you like. You have quite a bit of control. I have found a bug though. Sometimes it displays that I’m in another city and country than where I actually am.

For a moment it thought I was in England and in Holland. Haven’t changed country though.