Nexus? Give me a 2 year old Nokia instead…
I’ve been in the market for a new phone as a complement to my iphone, I wanted a normal candybar phone with T9 keys, a good camera and most importantly, an excellent GPS. I ended up getting a Nokia 6220 classic, which I found on sale for about 125€. It came with 8GB of memory, and after installing Ovi Maps 3.0 and Sportstracker, I decided to mount the phone to my bike. A quick bit of tape and a rubber sponge later and I was off for a bike ride on my local trails.
Here’s part of the map that was generated:
The sportstracker app (a free one from Nokia) automatically generates info points for the fastest point, highest point, as well as giving you a high resolution (and very accurate) GPS track of the route. I think there are apps like this for the iphone, but certainly none that run in the background and let you record video at the same time:
I didn’t realise until later that I had the camera mounted sideways, and the video that I uploaded to youtube was downsampled a lot from the original 640×480 source video. Regardless, there’s a lot more you can do on this two-year-old nokia (the 6220 was released in 2008) that you can’t do with a new iphone 3gs. Admittedly the web browser isn’t as good on the nokia, but i’d rather have good content creation tools than a good web browser.
Anyway - as part of my work on a facebook application for places, I worked out how to sync the places I have bookmarked with my Ovi Maps account. So any places that me or my friends bookmark, will end up on my phone. Fire up maps on my phone, click on the nearest bookmark, click ‘driving directions’ and my phone will give me turn by turn driving directions.
Finally, the camera is a 5MP camera with a xenon flash, that includes the GPS co-ordinates as EXIF data in the image, so that if you upload the image to my app, or a similair service (Panoramio, Flickr) the photo is seamlessly associated with a map location.
I’m impressed Nokia, well done.