23 April 2007

It's not necessary 2B perfect 2B famous!

Nokia N95 is the first Nokia phone with GPS functionality and one of the first GPS phones at all, and therefore the GPS part is one of the most interesting aspect of this phone there is no doubt. Over the past couple of months, probably the most popular question we’ve received is “How good GPS part is!?” “Are you satisfied with it!?” “How detailed are maps!?” So here are my thoughts and my attempt to answer on such questions. While Smartphones in general become very popular, smartphones focused in imaging, music or mapping seem to obtain even more attention although Nokia N95 isn’t strictly GPS oriented phone like Nokia 6110 navigator. GPS enabled phones will be hit and extremely growing segment because in my opinion.

Besides getting us connected with friends and places where we want to go, they help us during the journey and they have ability to tell us where the next restaurant, gas satiation or hotel is. Even better, thanks to the cell part you can immediately call the hotel and check if there is some free room and make a booking or look for another one if it isn’t the case.

Nokia N95 is the product that will bring GPS functionality to the masses, some will disagree with and say it is to expensive to do that but in my personal opinion N95 is extremely popular phone and it will be best seller this year anyway and therefore it will really introduce more people with GPS system and all benefits that you can get with it.

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First of all, for those who don’t know or who is still confused with GPS technology let’s clear what GPS is?

The Global Positioning System (GPS) is a satellite-based navigation system made up of a network of 24 satellites placed into orbit by the U.S. Department of Defense. GPS was originally intended for military applications, but in the 1980s the government made the system available for civilian use. GPS works in any weather conditions, anywhere in the world, 24 hours a day. There are no subscription fees or setup charges to use GPS.

GPS satellites circle the earth twice a day in a very precise orbit and transmit signal information to earth. GPS receivers take this information and use triangulation to calculate the user's exact location. Essentially, the GPS receiver compares the time a signal was transmitted by a satellite with the time it was received. The time difference tells the GPS receiver how far away the satellite is. Now, with distance measurements from a few more satellites, the receiver can determine the user's position and display it on the unit's electronic map.

A GPS receiver must be locked on to the signal of at least three satellites to calculate a 2D position (latitude and longitude) and track movement. With four or more satellites in view, the receiver can determine the user's 3D position (latitude, longitude and altitude). Once the user's position has been determined, the GPS unit can calculate other information, such as speed, bearing, track, trip distance, distance to destination, sunrise and sunset time and more.

Speaking of the N95 precisely, I am still trying to find what is inside, but all I know so far is that phone isn’t powered by a SiRFstarIII chipset. This legendary chipset is known for fast signal acquisition as well as keeping a fix in locations and therefore it isn’t very good news. I have compared the N95 chipset with my friend’s old GPS handheld device based on old SiRFstarII chipset and it seems that N95 unfortunately lost in most situations.

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My second disappointment is that phone sometimes requires a lot of time to lock on to satellites. When first time turned on, it can take some time what feels like forever. To lock on to a satellite it takes up to 3 minutes and sometimes it can be pretty annoying if you are in a hurry and need navigation or you want to start tracking. Also phone doesn’t maintain strong locks, in dense foliage or urban environment with tall buildings satellites lock is easy and often disrupted and at the end I just have to say that GPS chip build in N95 is far away from the great SiRFstarIII chipset.

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Another question is how accurate N95 is in practice? The more satellites a GPS receiver can "see" the accuracy is better. While the receivers with 12 parallel channels are accurate position within 15 meters average, my N95 is capable to lock up to 6 satellites when shows accuracy of 15 to 30 meters on top of my house what is good but not brilliant. Range up to 15 meters is average, 15-20 is already a bit worse but still good, from 20-25 is bad if I can say, and >25 is actually catastrophe in such perfect conditions. Anyway, keep in mind that GPS antenna is located behind the numeric keypad and to get the best performance, Nokia N95 should be used with numeric keypad pulled out.

But let’s try not to be only critical about the N95 and say something good about it. Nokia N95 is definitely “crossover” device that can be used for both on-road and off-road navigation. I know that a lot of people are looking for one GPS device which “does it all” and N95 definitely belongs in this category. Of course, this phone with its 2.6” screen won’t make the best auto navigation experience, especially when the GPS sits away from you on the dash but screen is still large enough and can used for in car navigation.

From other hand, most of GPS devices designed for outdoor use have smaller, not so good and very often monochrome screens and N95 with its compact size and large screen is the winner here, larger screen makes sense because you don’t need to keep it close to your eyes, and the smaller size makes it easier to carry.

Software, Navigation, Routing

The software and maps are even more important than the hardware itself. Nokia N95 actually comes with preinstalled Smart2Go application as the ROM application and it lacks maps. Also its important to say that Smart2Go isn’t Nokia in house solution, it is actually developed by gate5 and bought up by some time ago. However, the most interesting thing about S2G is that Nokia has decided to offer maps and route calculating for free. You can calculate route, look for alternate route, show route on map, run simulation and show your position on it and it simply great.

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Smart2go software isn’t N95 exclusive, the gate5 smart2go mobile navigator turns an 3rd edition S60 and Windows Mobile 5.0 based phones into a global positioning system, which doesn’t only tell where the mobile consumer is going and how to get there, but also provides helpful information on points of interest (POIs) along the way. Nokia has plans to roll out support for most of the major mobile OS platforms including Nokia S60, Series 40, PocketPC, Linux and other Windows Mobile devices. The platform allows mapping and routing in over 150 countries and has support for full turn-by-turn satellite navigation in over 30 countries. The application allows people to view where they are on a map, search for points-of-interests (POI) around them and create routes to get them there free of charge.

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Also if you are owner of some 3rd edition Nokia S60 and if you are curious how it looks like devices may also download application load maps and try it out even without GPS dongle.

PLEASE don’t be hesitate to ask anything

Smart2go is a hybrid map solution actually and map data from Tele-Atlas and Navteq can be downloaded directly via wireless network (e.g. GPRS/3G/WLAN) and stored on the devices memory card if needed. If all the desired map data is stored, no network connection is needed for mapping, routing and navigation. However, to prevent huge bandwidth computation which is important if you haven’t flat rate data plan it is highly suggestible to download and install PC based application called Map Loader that is capable to get any of available map and preload it on the memory card.

This is extremely handy solution because if you have plan to go somewhere, to Germany for example you can easy get all necessary maps from your home desk before the trip. As usually in practice things are little bit different and there are some problems and some strange solutions, the first one is the Map’s server. It is simply too slow, it can take hours to get larger maps and therefore it’s suggestible to put card in the reader and leave it for a few hours until soft gets and stores all necessary data. I was personally downloading map of Croatia which was about 150mb over 3mbps DSL connection but speed didn’t go above 5 kbps…

GPS VIDEO

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Another strange issue is the way of storing maps, downloaded maps are stored into cache folder but they aren’t separated by countries, instead of that they are spread all around the cache folder into 272 different folders and there is no way to remove or back up one single map. There is an only option to remove them all which isn’t so handy solution, it would be much better to have an option to remove certain maps only and free some space on the memory card.

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Basic navigation comes with the option to upgrade to full fledged turn-by-turn navigation with just few clicks straight from your phone and all you need is a credit card actually and if you need you can turn phone into a voice guided navigation system. The best thing about that is there are various licenses available, from a one week up to a three year term. This is welcome feature because when you are traveling to some foreign country for holiday or business trip you can download necessary maps via PC in advance and then simply subscribe to the navigation service for duration of holiday/trip at affordable cost.

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Anyway, one of the most important advantages of this navigation system is how easy it creates and calculates a route from your current position to any address/destination. Just a few clicks are enough, after opening route planner you’ll be offered to choose Start and destination point, start point has 6 different options but GPS position is the one that you’ll use most although you can also navigate to a Landmark, Recent, From map, Address and From Guide.

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As I said, the most common choice is the current position and after clicking on it application will show map and prompt you to confirm your position. The destination looks the same and of course it lacks only GPS position option. After choosing destination you can show route. There are two tabs after calculation: Interlay and Summary. After that you can show route on map, start tracking, start navigation or simulation. Thing which makes S2G unique is that it will let you plan route and even start simulation without an active GPS connection.

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As on the all serious navigation system there are a few routing options. You can choose the fastest or the shortest route and avoiding tunnels, ferry, toll roads… This should satisfy most wishes about type of routing you might want on the road.

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However, everything ends with map screen where all of the planned actions happen and it is very important aspect. You can choose if you want 2D or 3D view and change the map colors of the map. You can also pick which categories you would like to see on the maps and excluding unnecessary information helpful in a number of situations and if nothing else it helps to get faster and clearer map. The map’s interface is pretty fast, zooming is extremely fast although panning is a little bit slow on complex maps. Software overall is pretty stable but the same as all other applications it has the problem with RAM and attempting to open another application sometimes results with map application crashing. So once again I am going to say: Shame on you Nokia, 20 MB of free RAM isn’t enough for such a phone!!!!

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That’s basically all I have to say about GPS part and if I have missed something feel free to contact me at our forum section and ask anything. Also there is something not directly related to navigation. I would like to see some more functionality and I think that it is definitely possible to get more from the hardware.

For example, closer cooperation with camera would be nice, geotagging photos with GPS coordinates is becoming increasingly popular. It is the process of coding or tagging digital photos with information about the location where the photos were taken.

Another thing I have to mention speaking of more functionality is great Nokia’s freeware tracking tool released by the Nokia research lab called Nokia Sport Tracker.

Finally there is a cool solution that eliminates the boredom of longer runs and provides you with your own running coach for quicker improvement! It's really like having your own personal trainer, this piece of soft will definitely make you want to run and gain motivation for training.

With Nokia N95 and Nokia Sports Tracker you’ll newer run alone, you can track your activity and enjoy in some nice music as well, without need for any additional equipment, your lovely phone is all you have to have.

NST is a GPS based activity tracker that runs on S60 smartphones and as it requires GPS it will be perfect to use it on my N95 with build in GPS module but also it can be used on any 3rd edition phone with optional external GPS module. Information such as speed, distance and time are automatically stored in your training diary.

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I am writing this because I always support freeware solutions but also I know that there are probably folks out there who enjoy running or they may think to start biking or skipping and Nokia Sports Tracker is excellent tool to track your progress and it is so darn cool. You will want to exercise just so you can use it, export data and track information such as speed, distance and time. All information is automatically stored to a base and can be displayed and exported on few different ways. This NST will continually push you to do give your best.

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One of the coolest features is the support for Google Earth and if you want to see your recorded track on the map, you can export the workout to a file in KML format that can be visualized using 3rd party applications, such as "Google Earth". Sure, the soft is aimed for athletes but also it can be useful for some other purpose as well, you can track your car activity and speed for example.

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Another interesting tool is just released Symot Tracker can be used for online tracking of your vehicles as well as for navigation. It is also an ideal application for fleet managers to track their cars, trucks or vehicles online. These two applications are just examples and I truly hope that more applications will come shortly as well as some 3rd party navigation solutions that currently don’t support internal GPS chipset in N95.

.:[ Nokia N95 - Technical Specifications ]:.