Experiments in Mapping

When my mobile phone was up for renewal recently, I plumped for the Nokia N95 8GB - mainly because of the built-in GPS. We’re planning a cycling tour round some of Italy next month, and I figured it would be cool to record where we’ve been.

It arrived just before our trip to Modena (thanks for the courier service Andrew :-) and I downloaded the Italian maps into it, which made it pretty handy for finding our way around the variety of supercar manufacturers and museums, but there didn’t seem to be any way to pull the GPS data out from the phone.

Yesterday, Russell pointed me at the missing apps I needed to get things working properly. Location Tagger will add the GPS location info to any photos you take, and Sports Tracker will let you record where you go and then export it to Google Earth.

So when we were out for a training ride earlier, I tried out Sports Tracker. I couldn’t get it to record data for very long, so I’ll need to play around with it some more. I’m hoping that mounting the phone onto the handlebars might give it a better view of the GPS satellites than it gets in my pocket.

Still, it’s a start, and it means that I can show you a short section and an even shorter section of today’s 20-mile ride (I’ll be continuing to rely on the bike computer for proper distance recordings I think…)