My Mobile Life

I have been wanting to get my hands on the TomTom car kit ever since I purchased the TomTom app for the iPhone, several months ago. While in Melbourne last December driving in the CBD I was bitterly disappointed with the performance of the TomTom app (as buildings obscure the GPS signal). So I spent a couple of hours looking for a store that sold the TomTom car kit but there seemed to be a shortage of the units here in Australia.

Recently however the apple store began selling the kit, so I jumped online and purchased one for $159AUD. The product ships within 24 hours (for free) from the Apple store when in stock, so I had no qualms about ordering it thorough Apple.

As luck would have it this weekend has provided a perfect opportunity to test the new kit as my partner and I were attending a wedding on the south coast of NSW. We flew to Melbourne and made the trip in a rental car taking the scenic route through the countr, which we meant we had a good 1000 kms over which to test the device.

One of the reasons I purchased the kit was that I have been looking for a solution that would allow me to make phone calls while driving. I thought about buyng the Apple headphones with Mic/remote ($39AUD), or even the Apple in-ear headphones with mic/ remote ($119AUD). After testing a set of these for a week or so, I decided against using Headphones as the cord got in the way while driving.

I ended up deciding that the TomTom car kit which comes with a built in speaker and mic that enchances the audio for the phone would be the preferable solutions. After testing I have found that the sound is improved by the speaker in the car kit, particularly the voice instructions from the TomTom iPhone app. The speaker is small but is reasonable even when playing music and does enhances in-call conversation though unfortunately I have found that at times the audio is still too quiet to have a conversation with someone else who is also on a mobile while driving. Calls to landlines are better though and I’m told the clarity on the other end is quite good.

The GPS performance seems to be slightly improved by the built in chip, but my 3G iPhone is still slow when analysing and plotting a route (particularly over a long distance). The fact that the phone has no built in compass is also not helped by the in car kit and this is noticeable when turning corners and at low speed.

Probably the best thing about the in car kit is that it comes with a cable for charging the phone via the cigarette lighter. This is a significant benefit as it means that you can use TomTom on a longer trip, without worrying that your phone will run out of battery. Generally the phone seems to use quite a bit of battery when using the GPS chip, so don’t expect your phone to fully charge even if it is plugged into power on a long trip, but the charge you do get is a great deal better than nothing.

Another place the car kit scores points is on the quality of the phone holder. The attachment has a suction point which fits firmly to the windscreen or dash and a hinge mechanism allows you to adjust the angle of the phone once on the holder. This setup means that the kit should work well in most car configurations.

In thinking about how I would rate the car kit overall, I would probably say it gets a 3.5 out of 5 stars. On the one hand I have been slightly disappointed by the fact that I still can’t have a decent mobile phone conversation using it while driving and that the GPS performance is still a bit crap, but on the other I am impressed with the build quality of the unit and I love being able to charge my phone while driving. Depending on how fussy you are as a consumer, you may not want to spend $160 on the car kit when you get a perfectly reasonable in car holder for your phone for $20, however if you want the whole box and dice then by all means lash out on the TomTom car kit.

It’s well known that the iPhone battery life leaves somewhat to be desired and while I have heard that Apple have done a bit better with the 3GS, with the amount of usage a typical iPhone gets, it will always be at a premium. Yes, there are some things that you can do to improve the battery life on your iPhone (like turning off Wireless and Bluetooth when not in use), but generally there’s no substitute for having a charger with you all the time.

Of course a charger is only useful if you have a wall socket to plug it into, and for those of us who travel a fair bit, sometimes it’s hard to find enough places to charge your phone. This is an issue for those who spend a great deal of time in remote areas, or on outdoor adventures (bush walking, camping, dive trips) as well.

Once again, I’m happy to report that Proporta.com have come to the rescue with the USB Turbocharger 3400. I’ve been playing with this gizmo for a couple of weeks now and it’s pretty cool. Essentially it’s an battery pack, shaped like a very small external hard drive which comes with several different connection pieces that allow you to charge, not only your iPhone but most modern cameras, iPods, and other USB powered devices.

The first thing I noticed when unpacking the battery was that it’s extremely light. The pack that it comes in includes a small bag which keeps the battery and the various connectors all together when traveling.

The charger itself is equipped with a standard USB port for charging itself (this is done by connecting the device to your computer directly and generally takes 3-4 hours) and a mini USB port which acts as the outlet charge port. A bank of Leds on the device allow you to see the current level of the battery and also to see the progress of the charging process.

The kit comes with a retractable cable and a range of interchangeable connector heads including 1 x DS Lite, 1 x iPod, 1 x Nokia, 1 x Sony Ericsson, 1 x Micro USB and 1 x Mini USB. A PSP connector is also available from Proporta on request.

Other reviews of this device that I’ve read have reported that 7-8 charges are possible from a single charge of the mobile battery, but I guess this will very somewhat depending on the size of the battery in the device that you are charging. With my iPhone I have found I can get 3-4 charges out of a single  charge of the main (mobile) battery which would typically keep me going for 7-10 days, more than enough for most trips on the road.

In the end I have to say that this little gadget is extremely handy to have on hand for those trips where you may not have the luxury of plugging your phone into a power point every couple of days, but where you still need your phone or other device to remain charged and at approximately AUS$50 (excluding delivery) it’s quite conveniently priced.

Gees, it’s been a while since I posted anything to this here blog. I do apologise for my silence. I haven’t given up on you all, just been a bit busy. What have I been doing you might ask? Well, I’ve been focusing on Adventure Racing. In the last couple weeks this has involved a couple of Rogaine races, one here in Brisbane where I’m based and another up in Cairns in Far North Queensland. 

On the iPhone front, I’ve found that OS 3.0 is improving. You may be relieved to hear this, particularly if you read my recent post in which I talked about rolling back to OS 2.2.1 after running into issues with OS 3.0 and turning my phone into a brick for about half a day. This reversion was somewhat short lived (as Apple have actually made sure that once you’ve installed OS 3.0 you can’t really roll back to 2.x and run it for any extended period of time). So after a couple of days when my phone flipped out and went back into recovery mode I installed the latest beta of OS 3.0 (version 3 at the time) which ironically came out shortly after my post – talking about how crap the previous revision was.

As it stands, we’re now up to OS 3.0 Beta 4 which I suspect will be quite stable and hopefully iron out some of the puzzling issues that cropped up in OS 3.0 Beta 3 (for example the call button on the phone dial screen going missing). Dang!

I’ll be installing the new beta tonight and will quite likely put up a further post on this when I find out a bit more about it but for now I’ll leave you with a funny little thing that happened the other day.

I got a call from my very excited fiancee telling me that she’d done something cool and asking me to guess what it was. I’d been having a busy day and wasn’t catching on to what she was trying to tell me, despite getting clues like “it’s technology related”. After a couple of guesses and a few minutes of suspense she eventually couldn’t contain herself any longer and burst out with “I’ve bought an iPhone”!

She’s had it for about a week now and is totally wrapped. While, not exactly at the front of the curve (doesn’t everyone you see these days sport an iPhone) it’s turning out to be a great choice for her. She’s even listening to audio lectures from her uni lecturer on the go. Quite a good use of the device I thought.

I came across this article tonight about Mobile Wallets and how mobile users in Japan are using their phone to pay for things, replacing credit cards as a mechanism for payment. Having lived in Japan for several users as a young person I know that the Japanese love gadgets and would probably be the first to pick up a technology like this, but I can actually see this as something that could really take off here and in the USA as well.

Like many other people, my phone is one of the few things that I try to take with me everywhere I go. Sometimes I will have my phone on me but not my wallet and in these situations, even if I have a wad of cash, I’d like to be able to use my phone to pay for something in the absence of a credit card or ATM card.

While I know there are already cases in Australia where we have the opportunity to pay for things with our mobile phones, it really is the exception rather than the norm but I can see that this will change in the future and I’m looking forward to it.

I discovered a great little application this weekend called AroundMe from TweakerSoft. I got to test it out this afternoon while wandering around a little gallery in Byron. Yes, after another idyllic weekend on the North Coast of New South Wales, we decided to finish off the day with a wine and some food in Byron before heading home. While selecting our watering hole, I thought I’d see if the application actually worked locally as I wasn’t sure if it supported Australian locations when I downloaded it from the iTunes app store (for free).

AroundMe icon

Some of you might recall a post I wrote not so long ago about an app called Buzzd which lets you recommend places and things going on in your local area. AroundMe is similar to Buzzd, except that it works off a pre-populated database with information on facilities (banks, cafes, restaraunts, service stations, hospitals, etc…). The idea being that you can lookup facilities close to you, using the phone’s ability to pinpoint your location.

AroundMe - current location prompt

When you launch the application you are asked if you want to let it access your location info. Once you permit this, you see a menu which gives you a list of the types of businesses that you might be interested in. You select the type of place you want and after a short delay for the search, you get a listing of the businesses in the area ordered by proximity.

AroundMe - Initial listing screen

From the listing screen you can add the business to your contacts, email them or choose to see the address on the map. Alternatively you can choose contact info or see the route to the location via Google Maps.

AroundMe - Service station listing

AroundMe - Business detail listing

I think this is a great example of the sort of apps that the iPhone is perfect for and this one in particular will definitely be one I keep on my phone.

Ah, what a weekend! Snowboarding is a blast! I had been told that it’s harder to learn (initially) than skiing, but the big line up at the ski rental counter compared with the relatively short one for snowboards, was all the convincing I needed. I figured there would probably be quite a few similarities with surfing and this certainly proved to be true.

I took a beginners group lesson on Saturday morning which got me off to a good start with essentials like getting on/off the chair lift, skating and heelside stopping, plus a little bit of riding. But it was the one hour private lesson I took in the afternoon that really got me going. By Saturday afternoon I was linking up my turns and riding heelside and toeside pretty comfortably on a blue run.

Sunday morning was spent consolidating what I’d learned and discovering new runs with Kirsten, a comfortable skier who managed to drag me down a black run from the summit. A 2nd private lesson on Sunday afternoon with a great instructor named Evan proved to be the best way to spend an hour progressing my skills. He got me improving the speed of my turns and showed me how to do 360′s and a few simple tricks & jumps to get comfortable on the board.

Riding up the chairlift at one stage during the lesson the conversation turned to work and travel. Evan mentioned a partner in Guatemala and a desire to travel more. I mentioned the blog and the background topic of mobility and the lifestyle design process that Timothy Ferris talks about in his seminal book for the mobile warrier – Four Hour Work Week.

I also showed him the iPhone and some of it’s cool features, SMS messaging and it’s conversation viewer, the camera, iPod and mail. In mail I showed him an email invitation I’d received from a friend which had a Microsoft Office Word document attached. Prior to this I wasn’t sure how the iPhone would handle viewing of Office docs, but I was impressed by how easy it was to bring up the doc on the iPhone. Once you’ve clicked on the attachment to download it, the file is opened much like it is when you click on QuickLook in Apple Mail. While you don’t get the ability to edit word or Excel documents, I found that even when I had the option to do so with a PDA I rarely did, as it’s just too fiddly on a small device. This may pose issues for some business users but for most people I would say viewing capability is just fine.

At the end of the lesson I got Evan to snap a few pics of me trying out the board skills he’d been teaching me and I followed one maneuver up with the best stack I managed in the two days on the mountain. A head over heels, free fall tumble. Looks like I have a fair bit more practising to do up here and I have a feeling I’ll be back soon.

Okay, so I’m passing through the township of Yea (pronounced Yay) on the way from Melbourne to Mansfield to go skiing. Mansfield is, it’s a sleepy little town at the base of Mt. Buller in Victoria three or four hours Northeast of Melbourne and the snowfields up there have been getting some excellent snow fall this winter.

I’ve never been skiing or snowboarding before but as it happens, I have an old friend from school named Sam who works at Mt. Buller as a ski instructor. I found this out about a month ago, when I was in Melbourne last and happened to get his number off a mate. Time ran out for a catch up with Sam on that trip but I was determined to get together with him this time and also get out for a taste of the snow sports that I love watching.

After a bit of effort to organise it, the trip has taken shape and started tonight when Sam and Kristy picked me up at 6. We spent a couple hours at the fine food/wine festival and we’re now in the car about half way up to Mansfield.

Earlier on the way out of Melbourne there was a momentary panic when we emerged onto a part of the highway that was newly opened and we ended up taking a wrong turn. Sam began flicking through a dated old refidex and was just despairing about the uselessness of it when I decided to provide directions using the Google Maps application on my iPhone.

Ah, the trusty iPhone to the rescue again. This is about the fourth such situation I’ve been in during the past 24 hours. The first was when I hoped into a cab at Tullamarine airport and the Indian cabbie asked me how to get to Fitzroy. Why do Melbourne cabbies always ask me for directions?

Anyway, this brings me to the realisation that I’m coming to rely more and more frequently on the Google Maps application on my phone to provide directions and/or the details of current location in a city where my knowledge of the directions is sub par.

Back to this evening, I offered Sam my iPhone after putting in Mt. Buller VIC as the destination and letting the phone default to my current location as the starting point. The route was quickly plotted and I read out the distance and approximate time to the Mountain. It didn’t take long for Sam to start lusting after the device but I think what sealed the deal was when I commented on the tune playing on the radio and I gave my travelling companions a demo of Shazam.

Not far out of Yay, we pass through Bonydoon where an iconic Austrlian film (The Castle) was filmed. Turns out our little roadside motel is located about 5 minutes past Bonydoon. It’s a simple accommodation facility but the locals are friendly and the bar has a fire burning and is happy to serve it’s newest guess. Ah this is the mobile life!