Seen from above
Yesterday afternoon, the sun having finally decided to show its face , I hopped on my bike and took a nice long ride. This was my first major ride since I fractured my foot and I hadn’t had the chance to fully test the GPS tracking functionality on my new phone yet (a Nokia N95), so this was a good opportunity to do just that.
I have to admit, I’m impressed. The little I’d played with it before hadn’t left me with a great impression: long lock-on times, no-so-accurate tracking, etc. But since the last update, improvements have been really spectacular. It locks on pretty much immediately (A-GPS doing its thing I imagine) and also keeps a much better hold on your current location (it still goes off track here and there, but nothing dramatic).
I covered just under 100km in total but only tracked the first leg of my journey, from the supermarket where I stocked up on liquids to the small village of Arquennes where I stopped for a family visit. The reason for this being the major weak point of this device: battery life. If I’d run it through the whole trip, I would have most probably lost the phone a long time before getting home and it’s always good to have a lifeline.
I used Nokia sportstracker to log the itinerary and export a KML file which you can see embedded below onto google maps. All in all, I have to say the geek in me is quite happy with this gizmo and I’m going to continue my exploration into the world of location-aware services.