daveydave

In a brief follow-up to an earlier post ( Time to replace the mobile ), I though it may be useful to outline how I use my mobile phone. Everyone uses their mobile differently because modern smartphones can do so many different things, so what I need from my mobile is likely to be different to what you need. This is how mine gets used: I drive to and from work, so that is around an hour of screen on/GPS time per day while I run Waze . Sadly, my current phone just will not charge when plugged into a 12v car charger, and I've tried a few. It is about 20 to 30 minutes walk from the car to the office, depending on the route, during which I am tracking progress using Endomondo and listening to music over Bluetooth. So that is another 40 to 60 minutes of GPS a day as well as sending music to my Bluetooth headset. During the day I may have a phone call or two, but that's not too common. Yes, using the phone as a phone is nowhere near the top of the usage list. Other than that ...

I finally got round to hitting the countryside and going for a walk. OK, it wasn't a big walk by any stretch, but it was a start. I headed up to the Simonside Hills, just south of Rothbury and ambled around for a couple of hours. You know what, it was great. I'd forgotten how much I like hill and fell walking, and how fantastic the scenery is in Northumberland. I'd also forgotten how curiously satisfying it is to sit in the boot of a 4x4 and just look out at the scenery. It's a comfy place to change out of your walking boots and, should it rain, the tailgate will keep you dry. There was also a slightly geeky side to the walk. Having a mobile that is equipped with GPS enables me to figure out where I am, but it also allows me let everyone else know where I am too. I tried the system for the last 10 minutes of my walk today and, sure enough, the route appears on the website . Had you been looking at around 3.30 today, you could have followed my progress as I walked down t...

For those of out there who have one of these phones (or are thinking of getting one) the GPS functionality appears to be a nice little bonus. However, if your phone is anything like mine, it probably had the worst possible settings by default, making signal acquisition and absolute nightmare - easily taking 10 minutes to get a position lock. Nice and easy to fix though: Go to the Positioning settings through the menu (Tools/Settings/General/Positioning), select Positioning server , and then Access point . If you're with 02-UK you'll have 3 options: O2 MMS, 02 Mobile Web and O2 WAP (I guess other networks offer a similar choice) and the current setting will probably be WAP. This is far too slow, so change to O2 Mobile Web which uses GPRS or 3G. Bingo - much quicker initialisation of your GPS and suddenly it's a useful gadget.