Roland Tanglao's Weblog

Thanks to fellow Nokia Open Lab 2008 participant, Glenn Letham, for the Nokia Bicycle Cradle. Got it on Wed, mounted it on the bike yesterday and have done lots of photos and a few videos (one is embedded below). It seems the Nokia Bicycle Cradle was designed for GPS tracking, specifically for Nokia Sports Tracker and viNes but with a bit of jury rigging it's a fun tool for taking videos and photos from the handlebars of your bicycle (albeit with a not too useful view of your wheel and the road; it would be superb if we could tilt it really high or if the cradle was re-designed for on the bicycle video and photo taking). Apparently this handy cradle is NOT generally available. C'mon Nokia make this cool accessory available to all please! (And if anybody knows a similar thing for the iPhone please let me know!)

Seeing Ms Jen's and Glenn's posts about the Nokia Sports Tracker Widget a few weeks back made me create my own Sports Tracker N Series Widget page. Unfortunately Sports Tracker is maddeningly infuriating in that annoying kind of "Nokia can almost make software way" because:

1. Sometimes it works sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes it would freeze or stop tracking my movements in the middle of a bicycle ride when I first tried it (using the built in GPS on the N95-1 and the built-in GPS on the N82 (North American version). And I tried to make it work about 70 times (yes I have 70 routes on Sports Tracker and far too many are incomplete because the GPS froze) which I think constitutes a fair trial!
2. So I bought an LD-4W GPS when I was in Finland for Nokia Open Lab 2008, thinking that would improve the reliability. Well it did for ShoZu but for Sports Tracker it was no more or less reliable
3. I want to believe :-) ! Maybe it's the fact that I have an N95-1 so maybe I run out of memory? Maybe the N82 NAM doesn't work because it doesn't have the latest normal N82 firmware updates. Maybe it's because I don't use 3G (I'd love to use 3G but none of the devices Nokia has sent me to date has North American 3G)
4. And yes I know it's beta, I hope the next version called Nokia viNe is less flakey. Maybe both Sports Tracker and viNe are more reliable on newer phones like the N95 8GB NAM, N96, N85 etc! ShoZu has dramatically improved in reliability in recent versions for fanatical 30 pictures or more per day users like myself (pretty reliable for normal folks all along methinks)! Fingers crossed that the same thing will happen for Sports Tracker and viNe.
5. Postscript: just tried logging into my sports tracker account with my Nokia Account and it failed, in fact I can't login into my Nokia account at all. Here's the error message: "Servlet error: An exception occurred. The current application deployment descriptors do not allow for including it in this response. Please consult the application log for details." - Weekend maintainence? Regardless, a very unfriendly error message.