Navigon MobileNavigator Europe (iPhone)

I was looking into updating the maps for my 3 year old Sony NV-U70 and found that it would cost me around EUR 70 to get the latest maps (dated 2007, and thus also already outdated). That and the fact that the internal battery of the NV-U70 is in very bad shape (30 minutes and the battery is dead), made it and easier to seriously consider Navigon’s MobileNavigator for the iPhone (priced at EUR 74.99 till June 30th). For me another added advantage is the maps included with the application, I now finally have map data for Croatia (only 56%) but way better than the 0% available for the NV-U70 or the TomTom’s solution.

This my most expensive iPhone app ever that I purchased, but for me it was worth the price.

Overview
The navigation screen display a road map besides your current position on the map a lot of additional information.

Not all of the information is displayed at the same time, but can be easily switched between by tapping on the top or bottom bar

By tapping on the top bar you can switch between the following information:
Distance to destination:
Estimated time of arrival:
Current driving speed:

Tapping on the bottom bar allows you to switch between the following information:
Current position:
Next way point:

Lane Assistant
When you arrive at a point where you need to change lanes/take an exit you will receive onscreen and spoken information. For the exit show in the image even the information displayed on the roadsigns matched (happily surprised).

    

Speed Assistant
While driving the maximum allowed speed is show in the top-right corner of the screen. We you go above the maximum speed an exclamation mark is displayed as well and you receive a spoken alert.

  

These alerts are as good as the data available to the application, because on my trip I used a stretch of highway that had its maximum speed reduced from 120 km/h to 100 km/h. So please be mindful of your speed.

GPS signal and route (re)calculation
During the test trip the iPhone lost the GPS signal from time to time or the location was not accurate enough. MobileNavigator will than display the text "GPS" in the top bar and in the left-bottom corner an image display a calculator and a trail of way points). As soon the new route is calculated or the GPS has a fix again the normal navigation information will be displayed again.

To test the route recalculation I ignored the instructions at a certain way point during my test trip. From the moment I had ignored the instructions it took only 7 seconds for MobileNavigator to detect that I was not taking the advised route and it started calculating an alternative route to my final destination.

Phone calls
Receiving phone call during navigation. When the phone call is finished you will be returned to MobileNavigator and it will pickup where it has left off. It looks however it is a complete restart of the application so you will wait another 30-60 seconds for the app to have fully started and navigation is working again. So hopefully you never receive phone calls when you are on a tricky part of your trip.

Issue using MobileNavigator
I had some minor issues with information stored within the address book on my iPhone.

1. Since the new release of the iPhone OS (or maybe this happened even earlier) you can no longer enter a country manually, but it needs to be selected from a list of values. For most of my contacts outside of The Netherlands I still had the country information that I had entered manually into the country field. This causes in some cases MobileNavigator to think that these addresses, although foreign, are within The Netherlands. So make sure you properly update the foreign addresses you will want to use with MobileNavigator.
2. MobileNavigator only allows you to select addresses within the current active group of contacts within the address book. So I have a group named ‘Hotels’ in my address book and when I had that group selected within the address book, I will only be able to selected from addresses from group when in MobileNavigator. Hopefully this bug will be fixed in an updated version. So make sure before leaving the address book you select the ‘All contacts’ group

Using Foxmarks to synch to iPhone/iPod Touch

For some time now I have been using Foxmarks to keep my bookmarks synchronized between several machines I am using. At first Foxmarks, as the name implies, was for Firefox only. About 3 months ago Foxmarks put out betas for both Internet Explorer (Windows only) and Safari (Mac only). The beta period is now over (February 2, 2009) and you can now download Foxmarks for the mentioned browsers from the Foxmarks site.

By just using the Foxmarks software you will be using the following synchronization setup



Since Foxmarks allows for synchronization with Safari, it is now also possible to synchronize your bookmarks with your iPhone or iPod Touch. For this you will need a MobileMe subscription. The synchronization setup will then look like this



On the Mac side you need to setup for Foxmarks and make sure the Foxmarks synching is running

and for MobileMe you have to enable the Bookmarks synchronization

On the iPhone/iPod Touch side you have to setup MobileMe synchronization (visit this page for detailed information on setting up MobileMe)

I have only had two issues with Foxmarks so far;

1. Dividers in Firefox sometimes get replaced with “———-”. Normally Foxmarks does a good job keeping dividers being dividers in Firefox
2. At some point in time I ended up with two ‘Unsorted Bookmarks’-folders

Both issues are easily solved and never resulted in loosing any of my bookmarks and I am almost certain it was caused due to me playing around with some settings (MobileMe and Foxmarks for Safari) on two machines.

I am only using the bookmark synchronization of Foxmarks, since I am using 1Password to keep my passwords save and secure.

Sharing a hotel WiFi connection over WiFi

For my daytime job I am spending a lot of time in hotels, which btw starts to suck big time. To be able to keep in touch with the rest of the family and do a bit of gaming I usually pay for 50 hours worth of WiFi access which last me through the whole month, well at least most of the time it does. Since I am also an avid iPhone user I turn on the roaming feature from time to time, which to no surprise results in a steep bill from T-Mobile.

So I started to think about this. So I am paying to have 50 hours of WiFi access and I pay T-Mobile for the roaming charges. I started to poke around in the System Preferences panel of my MacBook Pro. Like I suspected by default there is a possibility to share connections from one network card to another. Great.

Now I only needed to find me a nice little wifi router to become part of my standard traveling kit, which is starting to show more and more Apple logos. Quickly I laid my eyes on the AirPort Express. This little gadget was just what I was looking for, great form factor and the right price.

This sunday I was visiting the Media Markt in Rotterdam and I saw some of these beauties lying around. There were even some demo models at a discounted price (€80), so I just had to pick one up. And since my last to bills from T-Mobile both had around €80 of roaming charges, this was a no brainer. Since I had to go abroad the same day I could test the device almost immediately. Which is good since waiting to start playing with any gadget is not one of my strong points.

It turns out to extremely simple to create a private (or public) WiFi access point using the AirPort Express. It only took me two steps (excluding the normal setup of the AirPort Express, which to be honest I don’t for sure now is there is such a process, since mine had already been used to demo the unit). Anyways, here is what I had to do

1) Enable network sharing for your active network card. In my case I had to enable sharing from my built-in AirPort to the built-in ethernet card

    Enable ‘Internet Sharing’ and select the correct ‘From’ and ‘To’ network cards

2) Open up the AirPort Utility application and perform a manual setup for the AirPort Express to create a wireless network

    Press the ‘Manual Setup’ button

    Within the section ‘Wireless’ choose ‘Create a wireless network’, set a network name and provide security information

After these two simple steps I could whip out my iPhone and have it join the newly created wireless network.

Apple, thanks for making my life so easy!!

Tip: When you buy a demo model for any wireless device be sure to ask whether or not the store employees have specified a password for the device. In my case they did, luckily the password as written down in the instruction booklet of the AirPort Express.

Keeping my digital life in-sync

In the wake of my new iPhone I am working on making the efforts needed to keep information synced between the several devices I am using easier. Currently I am using at least 4 devices, being;

• an iPod, soon to be replaced with an iPhone depending on the speed of both Apple and T-Mobile
• an iMac
• a MacBook Pro
• a regular laptop running the Windows OS for work

The information I am currently most concerned about keeping in sync are;

• Contact information
• Calendar information
• Bookmarks
• News feeds

Contact and Calendar information
This one I have solved by buying myself a MobileMe subscription from Apple. Despite all of the negative responses revolving around the Push not being a real push and numerous outages around the world, I find myself among the lucky ones. So far I have no real issues when using MobileMe. I had however some issues with the iPod Touch initially, it would sync over the complete calendar down to the iPod regardless of what settings I was using. After some fiddling with the settings I found what was working for me

• Set the iPod Touch up for manually syncing
• Turn ‘Fetch New Data’ to off
• Fetch mode to ‘Manually’
• Open the Calendar application and wait for it to (first clear and then) receive all of your data
• Set the iPod Touch up for Push
• Turn ‘Fetch New Data’ to On
• Fetch mode to ‘Every 15 minutes’

Bookmarks
Since I mainly use Firefox for my internet browsing, keeping my bookmarks in-sync could be easily achieved by using the brilliant addon named Foxmarks (see also one of my earlier posts). The only downside is that Firefox is not running on the iPod Touch or iPhone. This means that I don’t have direct access to my bookmarks when I am on the road. I could be using Foxmarks website to access my bookmarks, but I would much rather have a way of syncing my Firefox bookmarks into Safari.

This is something I still need to figure out.

News feeds
For getting the latest news from several web sites around the world I have been using NewsFire on my Mac OS X based machines. This has always worked fine for me, but since the introduction of the new software version for both the iPod Touch and iPhone combined with the introduction of the iTunes App Store a whole new world of abilities has been opened for these two devices (unless you had jail broken your device, then you had access to third-party apps for quite some time already).

On the iTunes App Store I found the application NetNewsWire (the link will take you to the iTunes App Store), which is a RSS news feed reader. I already knew this application as a regular Mac OS X application, but I had never really looked at it since I liked NewsFire and was not looking for a replacement for it.
With the possibility of running NetNewsWire on the iPod Touch this has totally changed. So yesterday NetNewsWire has replaced NewsFire on both my Macs and has been installed on my iPod Touch.
The synching of the RSS feeds is handled by using the services of NewsGator. Just sign up for a free account and your are pretty much set.

NewsGator also provides toolbar applications for both Internet Explorer and Firefox, but since these are provided as a downloadable executable, these are unusable on a Mac. I have found another way which allows you to add news feeds to your NewsGator account without the need of an addon or applications. I will describe this in a separate post.

iPhone 16GB

After some fighting with myself I decided to go for it. Wow, I managed to delay my urge to order it for a full 4 days, partially achieved by being out of the country since Friday but still, I resisted the urge to line-up at midnight.

So far for trying to make me feel a bit better of chunking out a decent amount of cash to satisfy my need to new technologies.

Since T-Mobile is currently out of stock on iPhone 3Gs it could take up to 6 weeks before I can hold that little gem in my hands. So for now I have update my iPod Touch to firmware version 2.0 so I can enjoy the new applications, already found some nice ones that are now on my list to be tested as soon I get my iPhone.