Marcin Juszkiewicz - gps

Maemo5 and (lack of) navigation

2010-02-08T15:15:00+01:00

Year ago when I was going to FOSDEM I took my Nokia E66 phone preloaded with Belgium maps to not get lost in Brussels. It was working quite good. This year I took Nokia N900 as the only device to use (no laptop, no other phone) and BUG to show something.

How did N900 worked as navigation device? Terrible! The problem started before travel. I installed whole set of map applications which were available:

Ovi Maps
Maemo Mapper
Maep
Mapbuddy
Navit

Only first one had support to preloading map data (by using Nokia Map Loader under MS Windows). Maemo Mapper had such functionality in OS2008 but newer version has something totally broken. Navit required use of extra tool for conversion but after looking at UI I decided that will not even try. Maep and Mapbuddy always fetch from network so roaming costs would kill me.

So I used Ovi Maps as less bad then others. Lacks of offline POI support suxx, lack of adding own ones suxx even more as in Symbian version I just added few interesting places at home and used them during walking on streets of Brussels. Nokia needs to spend lot of money and developer time if they want to make it usable.

So software was more or less disaster but I managed to get to the ‘peeing boy’ so (after seeing’ peeing girl’ year ago) that part of tourist attractions is done. Would be nice to have some way of preloading AGPS data as without network connection it takes ages to get fix.

Driving with Ovi Maps

2009-11-20T16:05:00+01:00

My Symbian based Nokia E66 phone has Ovi Maps installed so one day I decided to make use of routing function in it when I was driving to the town (on a road where I did not needed to be guided). BT headset on ear, paired with phone and let’s drive.

At start road was selected quite properly, the problems started later. Many times it was recalculating route (the funniest was when I stopped at traffic lights it recalculated route and then made it again after driving for 5 meters). Directions changes information were also distracting: “on 200m go left” then “go right” when I reached point. Or “go left,right” when it was straight road or when I had to turn right at crossing.

I have to admit that after two tries I totally gave up on driving with it and switched back to TomTom device. But there is one good thing in Ovi Maps — it works quite good for walk navigation. I used it in many cities abroad and it handled. I hope that Maemo5 version will work at least that good as Symbian one.

Car navigation with N810

2008-05-16T13:51:00+02:00

During last two weeks I did two 250km trips. First Poznań -> Szczecin, then return. Road into both directions is good and it is impossible to get lost but I took my N810 with me.

Before trip I started Maemo Mapper to generate route and fetch all needed maps (from Google Maps street view). This part was fast. I checked generated route does it have sense and stored on card as there is no offline route generation — you can do it only online by querying author’s website which send query to Google Maps, converts and returns XML.

Ok, time to go — I packed car with all our luggage and during that left N810 in car to get “gps fix” as internal GPS needs time for this operation. During trip we looked from time to time just to check are we on track. Few times tablet just rebooted which resulted in no GPS fix until next longer stop :( But it does not need to reboot to lose position — look at our return trip track (clean road, no tunnels etc):

Maemo mapper with some gps fix locations

I know that there are people who use Nokia tablets for car navigation. But how does it compare to TomTom Navigator which I had occasion to use one day…

Let’s see.

Function	TomTom	Maemo Mapper	Wayfinder
price	99 EUR for PDA edition¹	free (GPL)	9 EUR (1 month)
69 EUR (year)
70 EUR (3 years)
1 week free trial²
offline routing	+	-	require licence
detour planning	+	-	-
finger friendly keyboard	+	-	-
address lists with prediction	+	no such lists	+

So it looks like I will not buy HH-12 car holder to use N810 for car navigation but rather TomTom device or some Windows CE/Mobile navigator with TomTom software to have something usable.

often comes pre-installed on Windows Mobile devices ↩
after trial period each run shows requester with “enter license key or purchase” and settings window (on right side of screen) is not available ↩