Monday 5 November 2007

GPS Tracking and Navigation

It has always been part of the grand plan to use Sat Nav for during our European Tour. Towards that end we purchased an all singing and dancing SPV M700 Orange phone for £270 off ebay last year. http://www.business.orange.co.uk/servlet/Satellite?pagename=Business&c=OUKDevice&cid=1044134008063&extarg1=Phone&t=SMEDeviceFeatures Ours is white.

Supposedly these come with a built in GPS receiver but it was not activated on the one we bought. I had to do some fancy googling before I was confident enough to download from http://www.xda-developers.com/ and flash it with the latest ROM. It could have turned into the most expensive paperweight I'd ever own!

A word of praise for all computer geeks - stuff your copyrights and legalities - they just want it to work! And are happy enough to spend hours answering dummies' questions and posting it all on internet forums; all I had to do was join the dots.

Next on the list for dot joining is GPS Tracking - I'm currently checking out http://www.mologogo.com/ and similar. I imagine it would be fairly useful and interesting to some family and friends to be able to find out just where in the world we are, even if other correspondence (like updating this blog) is curtailed by access to the internet.

A breadcrumb trail of our entire trip would be a great keep sake too. A far cry from the highlighted map book that we have from our Colorado to LA trip. I'm not knocking printed maps though, afterall I am a GIS (Geographic Information Systems) Business Analyst. I find all map things fascinating.


1 comment:

Ange said...

Ha ha *cough* geek *cough*

I def agree the GPS tracking thing would be awesome! I can guarantee I would spend way too much time finding out where you're at in the world at any one time - yay! You can can do the world travellign and I'll dream about it while slaving away payinf off my lovely home loan :-)