OPEN THOUGHT
DON SAMBANDARAKSA
One month with a Nokia N95 has taught me that geotagging is fun, if one has the battery power and the luck to get a satellite lock, that is.
Nokia's beta labs (betalabs.nokia.com) has Location Tagger, a piece of software to geotag photos that runs on its Symbian S60 3.1 phones, both with and without built-in GPS. That means most N- and E-series phones can be paired with a 3,300 baht external Bluetooth GPS to provide the functionality of higher-end phones such as the N82 and N95.
Once running, the software will automatically add GPS information to a picture's header and, optionally, rename the photo to indicate that it has been geotagged. Once tagged, these photos can be thrown at many web sites and management software will automatically bring up a map showing where and when each picture was taken. Google's Picasa web albums works very well, using Google Maps to put a nice map to the left side of the web-based photo album.
A picture in isolation is just a picture, but a picture in context, with details of nearby buildings and areas is much more interesting.
Nokia has actually provided not one, but two ways of geotagging photos and it is the other, rather non-standard way that actually works better. While the main location tagger works by running in the background and tagging photos as they are taken, the Nokia Sports Tracker application works by keeping a continuous GPS log. While it was originally designed to track runners and cyclists, later versions have added photo and even video tagging support. So after a "workout", which could be a real run or just a walk around Ratchadamonen to listen to the concert/mob, Sports Tracker will look at the timestamps of media in the phone and correlate them with the logged GPS data.
This can then be automatically uploaded to the sportstracker.nokia.com web site for sharing. Yes, there is a lot of irrelevant information such as number of steps taken and maximum and minimum speeds (irrelevant in a photo blogging context), but the Sports Tracker map (also mashed up with Google maps) is somewhat easier to navigate than much of the competition.
And herein lies Nokia's problem.
The built-in sharing application only works with Flickr, MSN Spaces, Vox and is own Ovi, and it is designed (or crippled) so that it can only upload six very low-resolution photos at a time. Sports Tracker, on the other hand, while not designed as a blogging tool, uploads much higher quality photos and does not suffer from the six photo batch limitation.
After one such walk around Ratchadamnoen taking photos of people exercising their democratic right to peaceful protest (or, as some call it, a big Rockestra concert in the middle of the road), this journalist patiently uploaded 37 photos to Sports Tracker, complete with a map of where he walked and sat down. "Patiently" is the word here as Telenor's Dtac's EDGE network is nowhere near as fast as 3G networks in more advanced countries, such as neighbouring Cambodia's QB network.
But who has heard of Sports Tracker? Why should one upload to an obscure new web site rather than to an established blogging site such as MSN Spaces? Not to worry, we all live in a Web 2.0 age.
By using the Nokia Sports Tracker for Facebook application, the latest "workout" (or protest/concert) can be shown and shared on one's Facebook profile automatically, with thumbnails of the last few photos displayed.
The proof, as they say, is in the pudding. After uploading 37 photos to Sports Tracker, over 100 hits were recorded overnight and over 200 within a couple of days. Sports Tracker also has a comment function, but disappointingly, nobody left a comment either for or against the protest photos. Obviously friends had seen it and sent the link to other friends who visited the site. Either that or a few hundred secret police are closely following the writer of this column.
Having location tags on a photo and putting them in context is much more fun than seeing snapshots in isolation. Seeing the path taken, where the photographer walked briskly (mostly near the smelly BMA-supplied mobile toilets) and where he lingered (near a screen) also provided meaningful context that makes the photos worth more. But that is, if one can get a GPS satellite lock and has the battery left to upload pictures.
Of all the GPS units I have, the N95's is by far the worst in terms of getting a satellite fix. Walking through Hyde Park in London on a drizzly day the phone failed to get any fix at all. Three days in Hong Kong, with its tall buildings, was not any better and only on Victoria peak did the GPS finally get a lock.
More worryingly, it is worse than a low-cost 3,300 baht Holux M-1000 GPS receiver that can lock much faster, and one wonders if the best way to go is to disable the internal GPS and use the Holux unit via Bluetooth. That works, and is more effective, but feels so wrong.
The antenna is also positioned in a way that it loses lock momentarily whenever the camera is pointed down (say for a mussel-covered coconut along a beach). Yes, an external GPS is the way to go.
And then there is the issue of power. GPS, photography, geo-tagging and the occasional email and MSN chat means a battery life of around three hours, though that is better than when Sports Tracker is used in real-time tracking mode, where one can last for just over 75 minutes on a fully charged battery before the low-battery warning beeps. An AA battery pack with a Nokia converter certainly comes in handy, even if it is somewhat cumbersome.
And then there are the annoying niggles. If the geotagger is set to rename photos, the multimedia album application will aways say that the latest file is missing. An incoming call when uploading or emailing photos also often means a timeout unless the conversation is very, very brief. MSN and Gizmo VoIP cannot co-exist without crashing the phonebook, but more on that in a future column.
Oh, the joys of beta software.
So for anyone with an N95 that is used only for show, make the time to visit Nokia's betalabs, download both apps and start having fun. Upgrading your firmware might also be a good idea as the new firmware (version 20) seems to be a bit better than the launch version (15), and turns the GPS lock situation from abysmal to just bad.
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