I’m going to downgrade my phone.

I’ve decided to cave-in and buy a new iPhone, I’m really looking forward to being able to code for it and the UI, but it’s the day after the announcement of the device and with a bit of sober thought, I’ve come to the conclusion that it will be a downgrade from my current phone (Nokia E61) and 1st gen iPod Nano: here’s why:

1. 3G – the E61 which I’ve had for a couple of years has 3G, so this is just catching up really.
2. The E61 speaks the name of the caller, this is especially useful in the car.
3. The E61 has voice recognition, again, very useful in the car when you want to dial by voice.
4. The iPhone has no concept of profiles – the E61 will switch to the profile of your choice when it connects to a carkit, I like having a different set of tones when in the car.
5. The iPhone doesn’t do MMS. I don’t use it often, but I do use it.
6. The iPhone doesn’t act as a bluetooth modem. With a third-party app (Joikuspot) I can even get my E61 to act as a 3G wifi hotspot.
7. The iPhone doesn’t do sending of files via bluetooth – This astounds me, I mean really astounds me. I send contacts/photos/audio files from my phone to other bluetooth devices all the time.
8. My iPod Nano has a remote with FM radio, will this work on the iPhone? I doubt it.
9. The iPhone is only available on O2. Carrier locking is EVIL! Handsets should never, never be tightly coupled with networks, this goes against the whole GSM ethos. O2 gets no coverage in the part of the country in which I’m interested. I should be able to choose the handset that suits me and the network that suits me.

There are upsides though – the iPhone has a camera which the E61 doesn’t, although inexplicably it doesn’t do video and is only 2MPixels. The E61’s mail client is not that good. The iPhone has built-in GPS.

Meanwhile details of the new E71 appeared on the web yesterday. It’s got GPS and and 3.2MP camera.

Communications Specifications for the GlobalSat DG-100 GPS DataLogger

Time for one of my annual blog posts.

I recently bought a GlobalSat DG-100 GPS datalogger, which is a device that records your GPS position over time, so that you can later review those data, and do all sorts of fun things. I specifically wanted it for aviation, so you can review your flight track, and see how good your navigation is and how far off your desired track you wandered.

There are Windows drivers for the device, and only a Windows utility for extracting the recorded tracks and altering it’s preferences. Normally this would preclude a Mac user like me from buying it, however, the nice people at GlobalSat have published the specifications for communicating with the device, and some people have made their own apps for talking to it. There’s a Windows .net application for it and a linux project for talking to it as well.

I’m in the early stages of writing a Cocoa app which will do the same for Mac OS X users.

Anyway – The spec was a bit dry, being a .txt file – so I’ve spruced it up a bit and put it into a web page for Google to index.

[edit] – Good lord, Google indexed this post in less than 17 minutes!