[OSM-talk] Mobile countryside surveying tool

[John Smith]

2009/10/1 Kai Krueger <kakrueger at gmail.com>:
> Would this be possible to do with a simple waypoint that can then be
> exported as a GPX file? Waypoints in GPX also support a comment field, that
> could contain more elaborate notes than would be sensible in the standard
> name of the waypoint.

You would be best off making an .osm file that JOSM can handle.

> Having a J2ME only phone is a fairly obvious reason for using j2me. And
> there are plenty of j2me only phones out there. In fact presumably the

I was asking what phone Nick has, and it's not the most obvious
because most phones that support j2me don't have their wap settings
set properly, at least with the phones I've owned in the past, and a
lot of them had j2me internet access disabled as well, there is
something seriously wrong if you have to hack your phone's firmware
just so you can access the internet from j2me apps.

Smart phones on the other hand were designed to be able to access the
internet, in the case of iPhones and BlackBerry's they are always
connected.

> majority of all sold phones! For example the entire range of Sony Ericsson
> (excluding Xperia), or all of the Nokia S40 series phones, quite a few of

I was under the impression symbian phones had their own native apps too.

> which have an internal GPS module too. But buying an external GPS bluetooth
> dongle isn't all that hard either given that you can get some very good ones
> for 10 - 15 pounds with a bit of luck.

Most people keep their phone charged, it's annoying to remember to
keep multiple things charged, if one of those things is only used
infrequently.

> But as mentioned before, portability is another big advantage of j2me. For
> example, we have GpsMid running on phones from Motorola, Sony Ericsson,
> Nokia (both S40 and S60), Samsung, LG, Blackberry, Windows mobile phones, as
> well as on standard commercial SatNav devices (winCE) and even on the Sony
> PlaystationPortable! So if you feel like rewriting the code for all of these
> platforms, be my guest and I am sure we will accept patches for it.

j2me apps won't run on android, won't run on iphone, I'm pretty sure
they won't run on web OS, so in these cases you have no choice but to
re-code, and blackberry is most likely going to have to do something
similar with future releases of their JVM or they'll be looking at
loosing market share to phones with much better SDKs. Maybe Oracle or
MS will keep improving/updating the JVM on WinMo, maybe they won't so
there isn't any guarantees that j2me apps will continue to work on
WinMo phones either.