[OSM-Talk-ZA] New Member Intro

[Kai Krueger]

Hi,

 >Hi,
 >
 >On Tue, Sep 1, 2009 at 12:10 PM, Zakiyya Ismail<zerebral at gmail.com> 
 >wrote:
 >> I’m Zakiyya, living in Featherbrooke/Ruimsig and recently discovered 
  >the
 >> openstreetmap project – I think I read about it in the Getaway mag.  >I
 >
 >Welcome :)

Welcome from me too (although I am not a ZA mapper myself living in the UK)

 >
 >> I haven’t actually gotten started, but I have a Nokia E71, and I 
need >to
 >> install the necessary software which I am afraid to do since I don’t 
 >want to
 >> lose my current GPS maps – it gets me to many places, so any advice 
 >in that
 >> regard would be useful.


 >I don't suggest you try any of the OpenStreetMap-based navigation
 >tools on your phone -- in my experience they have not been good
 >quality. Of course, once you get more confident and adventurous with
 >OpenStreetMap, you should try them out!

I would like to respectfully disagree a bit with the conclusion of not 
using OpenStreetMap based tools on your phone, although many do indeed 
still have more of an experimental feel to them than perhaps some of the 
commercial products. The advantages on the other hand can outweigh the 
occasional rough edges in my opinion by quite a bit, so I would like to 
give you some more information about the available options to let you 
choose.

To start with, you can find a good list of available options on the wiki 
at http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Software/Mobilephones which also 
lists the different features each of the programs have.

With the Nokia E71 you should be able to run any of the programs for the 
j2me or symbian os platform. As this is still somewhat of an 
overwhelming selection, the programs you might want to try depend quite 
a bit on what you want to do with your phone and OSM. I would say the 
main features upon which to distinguish these are whether you want to 
also use OpenStreetMaps, or just record traces; Whether you have cheap 
internet available or need an off-line solution and if you want vector 
maps, search and routing abilities.

If you only want to record traces and don't want to use OpenStreetMap as 
maps on your phone, then Nokia sportstracker may indeed be the best 
option. On the other hand, if you do and you have unlimited internet, 
then and app like TrackMyJourney which displays OpenStreetMap tiles on 
your phone and allows you to do online routing might be quite nice. If 
data is expensive however, you could try one of the offline apps such as 
GpsMid, which combines the map data with the app and stores it on the 
phone. With GpsMid, you can display vector maps, search for roads or 
POIs, record tracklogs and waypoints and even do some simple routing 
based on OpenStreetMap, all for free. (although your mileage may vary in 
the case of routing). All of these programs are fairly simple to try out 
and play with (a copy of GpsMid with the ZA data can be found at 
http://gpsmid.sourceforge.net/prebuild/ ), so depending how eager you 
are, you could just play around with a couple and see how well each 
works for you.

As all of these programs are completely separate from the built-in Nokia 
Maps, they should not interfere in any way. So if you don't like them or 
they don't work for you, you can easily uninstall them again or use 
Nokia Maps in parallel.

With OpenStreetMap, everyone can do as much or as little as they want to 
or feel comfortable with, but I am sure you will get hooked eventually, 
so on that note I wish you a happy mapping!

Kai


P.S. I am one of the authors of GpsMid, so I am naturally biased a bit 
on this subject :-) And we do always try to improve the quality where 
possible