one of the main reasons that i got on twitter in 2006 because at first twitter sms sending message had no cost to it. they invented this sms sending stack with ruby from scratch. that impressed me.

it moved ruby/rails on as they made it scale to do things it had never done before. i'm not sure what they are using now. something cutting edge no doubt.

anyway, back to the point. taxis as anon sensor data across the city. i've got a stack of cradlepoint phs300 mobile wifi routers that i want to put into the local community - at first i thought about cultural centres but that never really went anywhere.

now i'm starting to think about taxi wifi and loyalty and sponsoring while getting data sensor services and data experiments in the process.

watching taxis in and around the local city centre might give really valuable data regarding swapping out with electric vehicles.

i'm tempted to put up a simple website with posterous detailing the idea and get some little business cards out to give to the drivers to see which ones are interested in having a wifi mobile router hotspot in the taxi. has to be useful to potential travellers and straight away shows the city is connected.

i love ideas. i love giving them away so people can go and do them so i might benefit from them. for sure i would love for my effort and ideas to pay me.

i'm working on the model that people will see my ideas, creativity and ability to execute them using social media that i'll get some work. it worked for me a few years back - right now however with less than £15 in my pocket to last two weeks i might have to go work at greggs ;)

utilising the power of itouch and mifi I'm writing this blog entry from the back of cj and dans car as we head in the general direction of burton to pick up my little lady. yay.

what you see above is a small armoury of digital devices that i'll be meeting with a local designer tomorrow - talking all things form and function.

watch this space this time next week for some draft pictures to see what wizard fabric things we are up to! ;)

the nomads are coming!

Sent from my iPod

since i got the bike i had become quite keen on tracking those 'rides' out in terms of calculating what kind of fitness it was doing for me. i know that every time i get back from the station even those five miles little bike rides felt like i was doing myself some good - even if i had a back covered in sweat from my heavy laptop bag (oh my kingdom for an ipad and mini wireless keyboard)

it started out for me with the runkeeper application on my iphone 3g which worked ok but i found myself with problems with the gps locking on and getting really random results with how many miles i had done and seeing straight line jumps on the map when the gps signal had dropped out. that said, it could have quite easily been problems with the gps on my phone as after 18 months the phone was starting to show real wear from all the times that i had dropped it.

after purchasing the bike i had decided on creating a separate twitter account for it at @carrerafit so that people would not get constantly spammed in the twitter main timeline (some would argue the amount i post anyway it would not make much difference) for my rides out and completed miles. i've been quite keen to keep a record of the miles i was doing.

then, news dropped that the iphone4 was to be released so i quickly put up my iphone 3g in for recycling with o2 and got my £173 back for the phone - not a bad deal i thought for a run down 18 month old 16gb iphone that could go to a better home elsewhere after recon. i had good service out of that phone.

two weeks after selling the phone and realising that i would not have the funds to purchase an iphone4 straight away i was left with a massive media making smartphone hole in my life that i needed to do something about - after 18 months of having this device attached to me day after day the sudden cold turkey of mobile device loss left me craving for a replacement. Not having the funds to purchase another i asked a few friends if i could trial loan an android based phone and i have been using the htc hero for my gowalla, photos and gps tracking action.

At first thou i did have a few problems with the android based phone because runkeeper that is available on the android phone requires v2.+ to run. the htc hero was sadly running v1.5 of the android os and because the phone was on trial i did not feel i had the right to flash the rom with the latest 2.1/2.2 android firmware that i found on the interwebz. i had to find another solution to my gps tracking problems and came across a great application called endomondo (thanks @iamkat) which did work with v1.5 and was really simple and found the gps satellites everytime on the htc hero android phone. i've been using this ever since until last week when i came across dailymile (doh, i hate finding new shiny shiny sites sometimes)

dailymile (again thanks @iamkat) is a lovely looking web2 style community based workout website that tracks your runs, cycling and a bunch of other activities in a really elegant and stylish way. the one problem for me right now is that you need either a nike+ or garmin device to get the most out of it - that's annoying me a little and i really hope they work on bringing in data from runkeeper and endomondo because i'm quite keen on staying with the endomondo solution at present.

that said @iamkat did highlight me to a great garmin gps watch device that looks ideal for not having to worry about keeping the phone charged up and ready to go and having it on my wrist could be great to track all those other little walks you do during your day - they all add up and i'm quite the power walker.

of course i do not have the £230 to purchase a gps watch and even if i did i have more pressing financial things to worry about to afford such a device. i'm quite happy with having my mobile phone collect the data at present as i'm always aware of charging it and the little holder space on my bike is more than good enough to carry it in. although, i have been thinking that instead of having an android backup device that i might entertain the iphone 3gs 32gb as the new backup phone to the iphone4 when i've saved enough pennies because you can get a custom case by dahon for that. the speed bump over my 3g would be better and i'm really missing audioboo on the iphone - it just does not compare to the android version! :)

quicklinks

http://dailymile.com (src: @iamkat)
- uber sexy bubbly layout and great tracking/community

http://endomondo.com
- really simple iphone/android gps tracking app/site

http://runkeeper.com
- original program, still like it but tracking was clunky

http://bit.ly/9UgnRP
- the garmin forerunner 405cx (£229) gps watch

i was hoping a lot from my first android dabble.

this is my first trial with an android based phone and overall i found the experience reasonable. i'm pretty spoilt in this arena in part to having the iphone 3g and the social features and linear way that it can be used to do the tasks i required at a speed that was acceptable of a smartphone when producing media. remember, we are carrying small computers these days not just phones that can make phone calls - i use mine for email, geo location, mapping and audio recording for interviews. it needs to be a multi functional device.

the one reason i originally asked for the trial phone was that i wanted to keep up with my runkeeper updates (i'm doing 10 miles a day but want to do more) and until my cheque arrives through the post for my 18 month+ iphone 3g (recycled) i thought it would be the perfect time to have a android phone to give it a good test of the application on a different platform. turns out that you need a 2.x version of android to run the android version of runkeeper. suckage. luckily i found a similar application which actually was much simpler and the gps actually seemed more accurate - it's called endomondo and that worked well.

i'm afraid to say that pretty much rounds up the 'good points' because overall i found the experience with the htc hero sluggish, buggy and unreliable. i never got the stability feeling from the phone like i did my iphone 3g. it seems to do random things and close down applications, beeping and notifying and the battery life was well, painful. i felt like i was using a windows machine all over again.

the ui looks nice but in practice actually feels very much grafted on top of the operating system. i believe that this is the case with this sense ui which is from htc running on top of android - i've tried it on the htc desire and it is better, but where as the ui/experience of the iphone layout feels thought out on the hero i felt like i was an imitation chinese phone.

it comes back to that old chestnut for me of 'entrypoint' - for me the 'consistent experience' you have with a device on a day to day basis are the foundations that make me trust and rely on it. i good phone to me regardless of who makes it is if it can handle my day to day pipeline - after years of open ended clueless messages on my nokia when it would not do something it left a bad taste in my mobile experience, every phone i have now has to come up to the experience that is the iphone.

truth is, no unit can pull all the elements together like the apple iphone can for me yet. this all said then why bother with android anyway? - i'm a sucker for open source projects. i like the fact that it exists, the fact that it can get better and that features that the iphone does not have will always be talked about when it moves up a new revision - take the htc evo for instance. that alone for a hotspot on the 4g and the fact that it has a 1 ghz snapdragon processor make it worthy of a look. even if it is heading up to almost ipad territory size (j/k) - i like integration, i like that google maps is polished on android and that it will never ever be as integrated on the iphone in that manner.

it's the stuff that the geeks that will not use or buy apple will always use as talking points. it keep things moving, healthy. and that's a good thing. when the mobile phone turns that corner to the all singing all dancing device switching between operating systems might be a thing of the past. imagine that. modular mobile computing. i've already had a conversation about geeky gps footwear this weekend. ;)

As i have effectively gone 'cold turkey' after my iphone recycle (after 18 months not being able to take photos of my breakfast as you can imagine is killing me - j/k) having to use the htc hero as a replacement created a fantastic oppurtunity for me to switch my reliance to another device to see if it could handle the workrate and usage level that i normally expect of the iphone - my tweet checking, my facebook and geo location updates - recording the odd audioboo and taking pictures and sharing them via email to posterous, all quite mild activity really for my iphone and nothing over the top but a clear day to day pipeline of actions and usage.

i wanted to like the android based hero but it is woefully underpowered. it's like jumping in a ferrari to find that the engine has been replace with one from a classic mini - it just about moves but it needs room to breath. also, i felt that the butchery that is the ui overlayed over the top should be an option to be removable - i've always said this for sometime that you should be able to customize via software the configuration you want your phone to run at based on a bunch of criteria on install and be able to unload or swap out modules depending on what you intend to use the phone for.

i really wanted to like the background tasks but knew that really, all i was doing is loading things so it could the battery down faster. it never felt dynamic - it felt like a windows machine you had been running for a year and need it's yearly culling to get back to full speed again. htc seem to be understanding what is required for the hardware side of things and i'm excited to see where they go with android - just wish they would not create lots of landfill products on the way to discovery.

drop the race, build something awesome - take your time, have separate teams building out different installers and versions for different 'kinds' of usage for different cross sections of society - allow your phones to be diverse - invest your time and community in that underground hacker culture who are actually making awesome hacked versions of android to run on your phones. you only have to look at the gaming sector and fatality to see how having someone hardcore can effect the demographics of your products - get these homebrew dudes together on a tweetup, collect feedback. build what they want. let them surprise you.

more thought needs to making that experience as slick as possible instead of throwing more horsepower at it which seems to be the case with the new htc desire. it's faster and slicker but until i've used a desire for any length of time i'm not sure if i'll get away from that reliability and stable factor. i just felt like the phone could do something unpredictable at any moment. maybe apple is smart to vet all the apps before they go up on the appstore helps the memory management/leakage control (i'm not sure) who is to say that background applications is a great idea anyway if they are not talking to each other in the background why have them there - make the apps
more efficient and less bloated, i would only want a few applications to be resident apps anyway - my geo location stuff, camera application and maybe a social network updating tool like twitter.

things i noticed about the htc hero as i played around. ..

• could not find runkeeper on the android market
• firmware from htc  (only windows only) 
• v1.5 firmware, need v2+ to use runkeeper 
• sound is great from headphones and spotify is great.
• found a villianrom that gives me 2.1 goodness but it's a hack
• installed http://www.virtualbox.org and then rc1 of windows 7 so i can do a flashing backup of the phone! :) 
• it aint an iphone - multitasking is slow on this processor/phonetype of android 
• text entry looks confusing and does not instil as much confidence as the iphone does when typing. 
• photos is not as feature light/rich as the iphone - i loved my pipeline of sharing/sending photos to posterous via email
• having things running the background not as important as i used to think, got annoying tbh. 
• standard twitter client is ugly - not white space and padding. lack of features. 
• quite like the side swiping to different screen effect
• aint no iphone thou portrait/landscape transition is lame. flicks to it, rather than rotates whole screen. 
• gowalla ran perfectly well on it 
• wifi detection notifications were nice touch 
• android settings are on the whole pretty good 
• why have a custom power connector on the bottom that LOOKS like usb but actually isn't. landfill.
• i like the side rocker for volume adjustment 
• the camera is actually pretty rocking and the auto focus works really quite well. 
• audioboo not as whizzbang as on the iphone for the recent boo tab - not as detailed