Roland Tanglao's Weblog

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.

After the 2.01 firmware upgrade, AirMe never locks on with the GPS and finds my location even if I am outside in locations where it used to work with the old firmware. Yay for bugs (Yes my GPS is enabled). Do I have to do some sort of funky GPS reset dance to make it work again?

Wearing my Mobile Muse 3 technical evangelist and Fearless volunteer hats, I'll be riding my bicycle with Amy Walker, publisher of the fabulous Momentum magazine about all things bicycling, as part of Car Free Vancouver 2008 starting from the Fearless Mobile Booth on Commercial Drive at 12 noon Sunday June 15, 2008. We'll ride to all the other Car Free Vancouver venues (Main Street, the West End and Kitsilano) and stream video live from my bike to the internet.

Check us out at:

• Fearless's Mobile site (where we hope, tech willing, to display a stream from my bike and from a car in a sort of "car versus bike" video mashup)
• My Qik Car Free Vancouver archives which currently has our dry run videos and after the event will have the archive of my live stream
• My Nokia Sports Tracker site which shows our Car Free Vancouver dry runs (dry run June 8, dry run June 11 stream 2) on a nice zoomable Google Map

How you can help:

• Come on down and participate! It's free!
• Take photos and videos and blog about it and tag it: cfvd08

Finally for techies, here's a diagram of how the technology works!

Day 2 thoughts:

1. Seems faster shot to shot than the N93
2. Photos seem more vivid (more sharpening)
3. EDGE s*cks but just like on the N73 less s*cky than GPRS
4. Video seems just as good as the N93
5. Got my first out of memory errors from the browser (at this point I only have ShoZu installed and a few videos and a few photos :-) )
6. ShoZu owes me lots of beer :-P for the number of people I have taught how to configure ShoZu over WiFi and how to config ShoZu in general (it's not that bad but it could be improved, the flickr authorize screen could be more obvious and that "chess piece" capcha has to go)
7. Just like using a Tom Tom GPS puck with a N93 and N80, the GPS lock is problematic and works erratically

This might eliminate the need to run Nokia maps to get ShoZu to put GPS coordinates in photos. Need to try this. Cyprien can I borrow that GPS again :-) ?

FROM Nokia S60 3rd Edition Applications Review » Tips & Tricks: Accessing Hidden Apps (Navigator, Landmarks, etc):

QUOTE

One last thing to note is that some people may have experienced problems when trying to use apps that require an external bluetooth GPS receiver. Within s60 3rd devices there is an app called Positioning that allows you to enable/disable your GPS methods. My N80 for example, shipped with bluetooth GPS disabled and I wasn’t able to use any navigation apps with my Nokia LD-3W until I enabled it.

END QUOTE

ShoZu geotagging with my N93 with firmware V 20.0.058 21-10-06 RM-55 N93 (01.01) only works if Nokia Maps has connected with the Tom Tom MkII GPS. I don't know why. This is a ShoZu bug I believe. Weird, once Nokia Maps has done whatever it has done, it works 100% of the time.

OK, the N80i is not supported. I hope the N93 is supported! Sorry about those having comment problems; I need to upgrade to Drupal 5 to fix it. Soon!

FROM Geotagging not working (Nokia N73):

QUOTE

You won't need to wake the GPS antenna, ShoZu will do this when necessary so you don't need to do any more than pair the device. What you will need, however, is a very strong GPS signal. ShoZu will wait until you have signal from 5 or more satellites before tagging your images because any less than this can produce inaccurate results. You'll notice sometimes on weak signal that your navigation software will jitter for a moment, if we tagged images at this time they would be way off. So please make sure you don't just have signal, but you have a very strong signal. We've done this because we figure geotagging is no use unless it's 100% accurate all the time!

By the way Roland, the N80i is not supported as yet and there are a lot of memory issues on this phone so just be weary of this also. Tried to post a reply on your blog but it had an internal server error and now I'm listed as a spammer and it won't let me post! Now's the time I finally get to ask you for support :-D

END QUOTE

Using a borrowed Tom Tom Navigator 6 GPS from Cyprien (thanks!), I did a little outdoor GeoWalk from Bryght at 1 Alexander to the Vancouver Art Gallery, I took 29 photos with my Nokia N80i. Only roughly 50%, 15 out of 29 were geotagged, shouldn't that number be 100% or closer to it?

Is this a S60, N80i, ShoZu, or Tom Tom bug? Suggestions to make this closer to 100% gratefully received.