This morning, I received an e-mail from Apple about the new version of the iPhone. I usually ignore these - yet another expensive gadget which I do not need. However, one of the pictures showed me that the iPhone now contains a compass. Investigating further, I found that the iPhone contains maps and GPS route directions. Does anybody have any experience of using the iPhone for route-finding.
I would welcome some feedback from anybody with experience of this.
Is it the answer to my need?
3 comments:
The compass is new, but GPS, maps and ability to plan a route have been with the iPhone since the first version. What it doesn’t do is give you is the typical SatNav turn-by-turn directions, but I understand that TomTom is working on an iPhone version of its software for the new phone and the v3 software update for older iPhones. I have used it a lot when walking – not for planning routes (it doesn’t ‘know’ footpaths) but you can quickly and easily see where you are. Like Google Maps, you see a map and can overlay the satellite images.
With the new software and the compass, plus they have added in programming APIs, developers can create turn-by-turn applications so they will no doubt be appearing very soon – the developer beta of the software has been out for months and lots of people have been working on new apps.
The thing I love about the iPhone is that it is the first genuinely useful ubiquitous device. Many people carry a phone plus something else – a phone plus iPod, or e-book reader, or camera, or laptop and so on. Now I just carry my phone. No, I can’t write a novel on it, but it’s fine (in fact great) for accessing e-mail anywhere – it plays nice with Google Mail, especially if you configure the mail to use IMAP (which is easy) so that the mail still lives on Google’s servers. Therefore anything you do on the phone gets stored in the Google cloud. I use lots of apps to do thinks like ‘find the nearest hotel’ ‘find the nearest restaurant’ and even things like checking the statistics and analytics behind our clients’ websites. I have books on it for when I’m bored. I can put films as well as music on it.
In fact, the thing I realised is that you don’t use or need a mobile phone as often as you think – but the fact that you need it sometimes means you carry it always. I use most of the other features more than the phone. From a technical perspective, it’s only an average phone, average camera – you can get much better phones and camera phones for less. But it’s the way that it works – you can much for easily (for example) take a picture on the iPhone and e-mail it to someone, or post it to your blog, or add it to Twitpix or whatever than you can on just about any other phone.
I’m not upgrading to the new version though – I’m only halfway through my contract and I don’t see the value in it when my current phone has 85% of the new features, delivered courtesy of the software update. That said, the new iPhone is much quicker and you can get double the memory – always a good thing when you’re throwing media files at it.
iPhone rocks !
maybe, just maybe contact Apple and ask for a 'donation' for your walk ..... you will be uploading to your blog from it etc .... all good advertizing for them.
They probably don't need it though as I see they have sold one million Iphones in the first 3 days of it being on the market!!
Anyway, they can only say no!!
If they say no, there are many others (some even better) coming on the market within the next few months.
Post a Comment