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Smart phones are becoming so common these days, and for me has become an alternative to bringing a laptop on the road with me. Part of motorcycle camping is finding gear that has multiple uses and my smart phone really fits that bill.
I currently use the Motorola Droid on the Verizon network and while it's not an Iphone, I am pretty pleased with its capabilities. Don't get me wrong I would love to have an IPhone but unless you live in a metropolitan area or don't venture far away, AT&T limited data coverage sucks.
( my personal experience, your mileage may vary with AT&T )
Aside from the obvious telephone capabilities, the Droid is a fairly good camera, and quite surprisingly a very good video camera. Along with its web browsing ability and turn by turn navigation with Google Maps just friggin rocks. So bottom line in my case my Droid means that I can leave my laptop, camera, video camera, and GPS at home. That is a huge about of space that I just freed up on my load plan!!
Well on to my point for this post.... Last year on my " No Destination" trip my lovely wife was our source of Intel. Every morning Jerry and I would sit on the picnic table with our map out and my wife on speaker phone trying to tell her where we were at the time. And her giving us updates on the weather forecast and radar.
This year we hit the road with a phone capable of internet access so we had the capability to do our own weather updates with us. But what I also did was what made the trip enjoyable for my wife.
"" Wait a minute Dave you said your wife was at home. ""
Yep she was but was able to see where we were and actually see photos that I took a few minutes after I took them.
Google maps has a companion program called " Google Latitude " where basically you phone reports back to google maps your location. And you choose other google latitude users to share that with. I installed it on a laptop at home and my wife could see where we were.
Now some of you are shaking your heads right now but you can disable the reporting feature if you want to go Ninja and tell her that you were in a bad cell coverage area. LOL Anyway this worked really well and she enjoyed the ability to sort of be on the trip with us even if it was via the internet.
I also have a Photobucket account and the Android Market ( apps store for Droids ) has a free app for photobucket. one of the options in the settings it that it will automatically upload a photo to photobucket when you take the picture. Again be smart here, it can get you in trouble if you are in the afore mentioned "Ninja Mode." LOL
Over all it was more for my wife, but our evening phone calls from the campground were more than the " I miss you, when are you coming home" discussions. She really enjoyed being able to see where we were and then looking at the photos while we were at that location.
This worked great and earned me some much needed brownie points with the wife. For the most part I had data coverage most of the trip so she was able see most of the route.
See ya on the road....
DDB - out
I currently use the Motorola Droid on the Verizon network and while it's not an Iphone, I am pretty pleased with its capabilities. Don't get me wrong I would love to have an IPhone but unless you live in a metropolitan area or don't venture far away, AT&T limited data coverage sucks.
( my personal experience, your mileage may vary with AT&T )
Aside from the obvious telephone capabilities, the Droid is a fairly good camera, and quite surprisingly a very good video camera. Along with its web browsing ability and turn by turn navigation with Google Maps just friggin rocks. So bottom line in my case my Droid means that I can leave my laptop, camera, video camera, and GPS at home. That is a huge about of space that I just freed up on my load plan!!
Well on to my point for this post.... Last year on my " No Destination" trip my lovely wife was our source of Intel. Every morning Jerry and I would sit on the picnic table with our map out and my wife on speaker phone trying to tell her where we were at the time. And her giving us updates on the weather forecast and radar.
This year we hit the road with a phone capable of internet access so we had the capability to do our own weather updates with us. But what I also did was what made the trip enjoyable for my wife.
"" Wait a minute Dave you said your wife was at home. ""
Yep she was but was able to see where we were and actually see photos that I took a few minutes after I took them.
Google maps has a companion program called " Google Latitude " where basically you phone reports back to google maps your location. And you choose other google latitude users to share that with. I installed it on a laptop at home and my wife could see where we were.
Now some of you are shaking your heads right now but you can disable the reporting feature if you want to go Ninja and tell her that you were in a bad cell coverage area. LOL Anyway this worked really well and she enjoyed the ability to sort of be on the trip with us even if it was via the internet.
I also have a Photobucket account and the Android Market ( apps store for Droids ) has a free app for photobucket. one of the options in the settings it that it will automatically upload a photo to photobucket when you take the picture. Again be smart here, it can get you in trouble if you are in the afore mentioned "Ninja Mode." LOL
Over all it was more for my wife, but our evening phone calls from the campground were more than the " I miss you, when are you coming home" discussions. She really enjoyed being able to see where we were and then looking at the photos while we were at that location.
This worked great and earned me some much needed brownie points with the wife. For the most part I had data coverage most of the trip so she was able see most of the route.
See ya on the road....
DDB - out
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