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Android: The Future Of Consumer GPS – Part I

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in Android and GPS. 5 Comments

I’ve owned a handheld GPS ever since the first “consumer-grade” model, the Motorola Traxar, was released in 1993: $900, 6 AA batteries, 8 satellites max, could only record waypoints, and about the size and weight of a brick. Man, was that an awesome GPS unit! I’ve upgraded several times since then, and am glad that handhelds have improved as much as they have. But I’ve always chafed at their restricted ability to record information out in the field: waypoints with a name and short description, tracks with a name, and that’s pretty much it.

Back in January, I posted my “wishlist” for a field-ready GPS unit; I had hoped that the newer Garmin Oregon models might satisfy most of those requirements, but a lousy touch interface makes those units too difficult to work with. I tried to put together a “field-ready” semi-rugged Windows netbook that met most of my needs, but the poor screen visibility in sunlight conditions was just too great a restriction on its use; while still handy to have, full utility required either shade or a cloth draped over my head. I had pretty much given up on finding what I wanted, and was about to buy one of the new Garmin 62-series GPS units as an upgrade from my trusty Garmin 60Cx; nowhere near all the features I wanted, but enough extra ones (aerial/raster imagery, three-axis compass) to justify the purchase.

A recent upgrade in local cellular antennas finally let me dump my landline phone, and move over to a full-time cellular connection. As part of that process, I decided to pick up an Android smartphone, specifically a Motorola Droid X. While I knew it came with a GPS, that wasn’t the primary reason for getting it – I just wanted a phone that would allow me to stay connected to email and Internet when I was out and about. But having used it for a few weeks now, I’m now convinced that GPS-capable Android-powered units, phones or otherwise, are going to completely transform both the handheld and automotive GPS markets.

Here’s a comparison of my Droid X with the comparable top-of-the-line Garmin unit, the Oregon 550. Bold text indicates which unit IMHO has the advantage in that category.

	Motorola Droid X	Garmin Oregon 550	Comments
Price	$569 list	$499 list	The Garmin is often discounted by about $100; the Droid X currently isn’t, but will likely drop dramatically in price over the next six months. This doesn’t include cellular plan costs.
Weight	6 oz.	6.8 oz.
Processor Speed	1 GHz	200 MHz (?)
Storage RAM	8 GB	2 GB
microSD expansion	Comes with 16 GB, can take up to 32 GB	Comes with none, can take up to 4 GB
Display size	4.3” diagonal	3” diagonal
Screen Resolution	480 x 840	240 x 400
DPI	240	157
Color Depth	16 (24)	16	Droid X screen is 24-bit-color capable, but some specs indicate that the OS is only displaying 16-bit color
Daylight Screen Visibility	Good	Very good	Biggest problem with Droid X screen is glare; screen protector helps with that.
Shade/Indoor Screen Visibility	Outstanding	Very good
GPS Satellites	12	12+	Unclear from specs
WAAS/EGNOS	No?	Yes	Unclear from specs
Assisted GPS	Yes	No	Network signal reduces TTFF
Three-axis compass	Yes	Yes
Camera	8 MP	5 MP
Multiple camera modes	Yes	No	Droid X has standard, macro, panorama, plus multiple exposure controls
Video	Yes – 720p HD	No
Barometric Altimeter	No	Yes
Calculator	Yes	Yes	Droid X has advantage because you can download and install multiple calculator apps
Touchscreen	Yes; multi-touch capacitive	Yes; resistive	A draw; multi-touch is useful, but resistive can be used with gloves on
Keyboard data entry	Yes; multiple QWERTY keyboards available, some with text prediction	Yes; A-Z keyboard	You can choose your preferred data entry mode with the Droid.
Voice-to-text data entry	Yes, with wireless connection	No
Voice recording	Yes	No
Text data limits	Limited only by unit’s memory	Limited by waypoint data fields – about 80 characters
Wireless connectivity	WiFi; 3G; Bluetooth	Proprietary wireless interface	With a Garmin, you can only transfer wireless data between compatible units
Battery life	5-6 hours (?)	16 hours	For Droid X, depends on screen brightness, whether you have the wireless connections on, etc..
Field-rugged	No	Yes	Garmin is IPX7-waterproof
Built-in maps	Yes	Yes	Garmin has baseline vector map; Droid has Google Maps
Free up-to-date online maps and POI data	Yes	No	Garmin’s detailed vector maps have to be purchased; updates cost extra. Droid has access to continuously-updated maps for free, but these typically require the unit to be online.
Offline raster maps	Yes with third-party apps	Yes with Garmin Custom Maps, BirdsEye subscription
Offline vector data	Yes with third-party apps	Yes with free/paid Garmin maps	Garmin data ecosystem still far superior here.
Car navigation	Yes (free, but requires wireless connection)	Yes (requires paid Garmin maps)	Draw; Droid has voice, 3D navigation, but requires wireless connection; Garmin works offline.
Waypoints, tracks, routes	Yes with third-party apps	Yes	Droid third-party apps give you more freedom with what you do with the data
Geocaching	Yes with third-party apps	Yes
Ability to add additional applications	YES	NO

I could go on, but just from the above, the Droid X is at least competitive with the Garmin feature-wise, and you could easily make the argument that overall it’s far superior. The few categories where the Droid X falls short (WAAS, ruggedness, battery life) can be partially remedied with add-ons: you can use it with a WAAS-capable Bluetooth GPS transmitter, spare batteries are cheap on eBay, and cases offer some level of physical protection. But more to the point, they are due to the Droid X being designed to be primarily a cellphone, not a GPS unit. It really shouldn’t be hard at all to design a unit that remedies those failings, and sell it at a reasonable cost.

Here’s a link to a mil-spec ruggedized Android GPS unit already available; currently costs $1200, but divide that by the factor of 3-5 that military contractors typically add on and you’d have a reasonably-priced consumer unit. Less-expensive consumer Android models with GPS are on the way, like the Samsung Yepp at about $350, or this Archos mini-tablet for $150; it’s not that big a stretch to think that fully field-qualified versions of those units could be made and sold fairly cheaply. And I’m especially intrigued by the Notion Ink Adam, an Android-based tablet due out late this year or early next year. The Adam will be offered with an optional 10.1” Pixel Qi LCD screen, which can be switched from a standard transmissive LCD mode to a sunlight-visible transflective color mode, and then to a low-power black-and-white e-Ink-like mode. With GPS, WiFi, 3G, and built-in camera, this model will sell for $498, or less than a Wifi-only iPad.

But hardware is only a small part of Android’s advantage; the big advantage is that you can put applications onto an Android unit to add functionality, something you can’t do with standard Garmin GPS units. There are already hundreds of position/geography/location-aware apps available for Android units, and that number grows every day. There’s currently only a very limited number of GIS-related apps, but I’d be surprised if many more of those don’t show up soon. And even with the limited number of apps currently available, you can already do far more with an GPS-equipped Android unit than with a standard handheld GPS. Given the impending death of the classic Windows Mobile platform, the primarily OS for many portable GIS and data acquisition apps like ArcPad and Terrasync, it would make sense for companies like Trimble and Ashtech to look at Android as a viable platform for future hardware and software development.

I suppose that the Apple iPhone/iTouch/iPad/iOs ecosystem could be a viable alternative to Android-based models – the hardware and software are certainly good enough – but I doubt it will be. Anyone can license the Android OS and create a hardware device that uses it, which means more models, more competition, and lower prices. Apple has firm and exclusive control of all hardware that runs iOS, which means fewer models and higher prices. I think they’re repeating the same mistakes that resulted in Windows dominating the PC market, but whatever; at least for now, it’s a lucrative market for them.

All for now – a few more random thoughts tomorrow.

Free Tools For Custom Garmin Vector Maps XVIII: Full GUI For mkgmap Compiler

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Leszek Pawlowicz

in Garmin and GPS. 1 Comment

Took a while, but this is the final installment of my epic 18-part series on free tools for making custom Garmin vector maps. I covered the free map compiler mkgmap in part 13, which converts OpenStreetMap data files (.osm) and Polish map files (.mp) to Garmin’s binary .img format. It’s command-line only, which can make it a pain to use. I wrote a simple Windows GUI for it a while back, but it wasn’t very good:

It required the compiler to be in the same directory as the data file.
It only worked for .osm files, not .mp files.
It assigned every compiled map the same default Map ID number (63240001.img), which meant that you could only use one compiled map at a time without having map conflicts.
It didn’t allow use of any of mkgmap’s more advanced options.

I’ve finally gotten around to fixing some of these issues, and now have a newer version of the GUI available; download it here (it comes with a copy of the mkgmap compiler), and unzip it into the folder of your choice. You’ll need to have Java 1.6 installed on your system; which you can check at the Java website. Run the executable:

supermkgmapgui

Use the button at upper-right to select the .osm or .mp file you want to compile. Hold the mouse cursor over each of the variable options to see pop-up help text describing their use, derived from mkgmap’s original documentation. The most important variables in the General Options section are:

Map ID Number, which should be a unique integer value between 65536 and 99999999 to avoid conflicts with other maps
Description, which identifies the mapset in the GPS unit

The other General options don’t seem to make that much of a difference.

Optimization options include Reduce Point Density with the Douglas-Peuckel algorithm to shrink the map size and speed up display; default is 2.6, and higher values simplify even more (mkgmap’s author recommends 10 as a good value). Turning Merge Lines on attempts to merge features together to simplify a map; haven’t noticed it making that much of a difference. For miscellaneous options, Draw Priority determines in what order vector maps are drawn; higher values mean the map is drawn later, on top of maps with lower values, obscuring those maps completely. Transparent maps have the higher priority of all, but you can see all parts of the vector map below them that aren’t obscured by the features in the transparent map (like a clear overlay on top of another map).

Once the options are set, pressing the “Compile” button creates a batch file called “compile.bat” that is then executed to compile the map code into the binary .img Garmin format; you should find the resulting file in the same directory as the map code file. Opening the “compile.bat” file in a text editor will show you the command line usage of mkgmap, and you can modify it there for further use if you like. You’ll find the compiled map in the same directory as the original map code file, with a filename that’s the same as the Map ID Number, and the file extension “.img”. See other posts in this series for info on how to upload this file to your Garmin GPS unit.

“Reset” clears out the option values, “Help” takes you to this blog post, and “Exit” does what you’d expect.

This isn’t the full set of options supported by mkgmap; I’ve left out all of the routing options, and a bunch of others associated with creating full mapsets. I may wind up slowly adding some of those options on in the future, but this version should be good enough for basic map compilation. As usual, use at your own discretion/peril, and report any bugs to me.

Geotagging Coordinate Viewer For Adobe CS5

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Leszek Pawlowicz

in geotagging and GPS. Closed

Adobe has released a free plug-in for applications in their Creative Suite 5 (CS5) (e.g. Photoshop, Illustrator) that adds a “GPS” tab to the info window:

It doesn’t do a lot, just display an image’s embedded geotagging information in it, but it’s better than nothing. Available for both Windows and Mac.

From DPreview, via OgleEarth.

Handheld GPS Units – Beyond The Manual

Published by

Leszek Pawlowicz

in Garmin, GPS and Magellan. 1 Comment

It’s no secret that the manuals many GPS makers puts out with their handheld GPS units aren’t always ideal. They can be very confusing, give cursory explanations of more complicated functions, and often leave out any mention at all of advanced functions. Plus, as firmware gets updated and features get added/dropped, the printed versions become out-of-date, and even the online PDF versions lag in adding descriptions of new features. Here are some online resources to help plug the info gaps for these units.

GPSFaqs.Org: Contains comprehensive FAQs for the following Garmin models -

eTrex Legend HCx, Cx
eTrex Vista HCx, Cx
GPSMap 60Cx, 60CSx
GPSMap 76Cx, 76CSx

If your eTrex model or GPSMap isn’t listed above, you may find the answer you’re looking for in the FAQ for a different but comparable model, since most of these models share a similar OS/interface.

GPSFaqs.Org also has FAQs for Magellan GPS units; coverage is strong for Explorist models, but cursory for Triton models.

Yahoo Groups: A number of active groups for the GPSMap series (60Cx/60CSx and 76Cx/76Cx), as well as eTrex models (general and the Legend). Not a lot of action in the Triton or DeLorme forums.

Groundspeak GPS And Technology Forum: Free registration required. Regular postings/discussion on GPS units from a variety of manufacturers, mainly Garmin and DeLorme.

DeLorme Community Forum: Probably the best source for info about the DeLorme PN series of GPS receivers.

TritonForum: By far the best source of info for the Magellan Triton series.

GPSFix Wikis: Created by Scott at GPSFix.Net, an exceptionally strong resource for info about modern Garmin units in the following series:

gpsinformation.net: Tons of general info about GPS, and pages about specific units from a wide variety of makers, some dating back to the 1990s! May take a bit of hunting to find the info you’re looking for.

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waze: Free Crowd-Sourced Traffic Phone Apps

Published by

Leszek Pawlowicz

in GPS. Closed

From email comes a link to waze, a free mobile phone app (iPhone, Android, Windows Mobile, Blackberry) that sends back real-time GPS-or-cell-tower-derived position/speed data from phones to determine where traffic problems might be occurring, and then alerts you to potential traffic issues. Here’s their video guided tour (click on “Go” to start):

Seems like a clever idea, but I see some problems:

Chicken-and-egg: the service only really becomes useful when lots of people use it in a specific area, but if they won’t use it until it become useful, it will never achieve critical mass. On the home page is a dropdown list of current areas at least partially covered by waze, and most of them show the project as being in the very earliest phase, with limited utility.
The business model relies on taking user-driving tracks, and using it to create updated navigation maps for sale; they also intend to rely on users to manually make road database updates. The OpenStreetMap project has already captured a large mind-share for this concept based on generating a freely-available database, and I wonder if people will do the same for a commercial service. They plan to offer rewards points and rankings to encourage this, but who knows?
The initial database is derived from US Census Tiger data, and doesn’t use OpenStreetMap data; they say it’s because of OSM’s data license, but I hear that may be in the process of changing. Tiger data isn’t bad, but OSM is better (since it’s Tiger data refined).
It’s not a navigation app, only a traffic app; this may put some people off since they may expect to nav app.
Finally, Google Maps, Bing Maps (and probably others) already offer real-time traffic data, although not with the same granularity as Waze might (i.e. local street data). But I don’t see why Google couldn’t add this particular feature to their Android navigation app fairly easily, and their large installed database would make it almost immediately useful.

But hey, it’s free – worth a look. Could be successful in the end.

Status Of The Garmin Map Compiler cgpsmapper – ?

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Leszek Pawlowicz

in Garmin and GPS. 2 Comments

Both GPSTracklog and GPSFix link to a page on the cgpsmapper website that indicates development will be ceasing on that Garmin map compiler. This is a real shame; over the past decade, this compiler has driven the creation of thousands of freely-available maps for Garmin GPS units, as well as being a boon for creating your own personal custom maps. I use it all the time – just posted about it again recently. Even some international Garmin units have sold maps created with cgpsmapper.

In a more detailed post at the Yahoo Map Authors group, Stan Kozicki, the author of cgpsmapper, talks about this issue in greater detail. His biggest problem appears to be his inability to keep up with changes in the Garmin binary map format, since Garmin doesn’t formally document it; I know they recently made a change that broke map “locking” in his commercial version of the program. He’s apparently still talking to Garmin about some kind of continuation of the program for use in non-commercial independent map creation, with them possibly supplying more detailed information about the Garmin format. But Garmin appears to want the commercial versions of cgpsmapper to go away in favor of their commercial (and expensive) Map Product Creator.

I really hope that Stan and Garmin can come to some kind of agreement; I think the availability of cgpsmapper and the Garmin maps it creates helps drive commercial demand for Garmin units. Ten years ago, Garmin and Magellan had comparable market shares in the handheld GPS field; today, Garmin overwhelmingly dominates that arena, and is also far more popular than Magellan in the automotive arena as well. I don’t know how much the ability to create custom Garmin maps with free software had to do with that (creating custom Magellan maps is far more difficult, and requires proprietary software), but it certainly didn’t hurt.

In any case, there’s no indication from Stan that he will withdraw the last free version of cgpsmapper from availability anytime soon, and maps created with that version should work fine on most current Garmin models. Other free options for compiling Garmin map files include mkgmap, MapTk and MapDekode. I’ve been playing quite a bit with mkgmap recently, and am pretty impressed; it’s command-line only (like cgpsmapper), but I’m working on a GUI that will support most of its features/options.

Removing Time Data Out Of A GPX Or KML File To Make It Work Right In Google Earth

Published by

Leszek Pawlowicz

in Google Earth, GPS, GPX and KML. 4 Comments

In the process of writing yesterday’s post on Garmin Basecamp, I found an annoying flaw on how Google Earth handles GPX files. In a recent GPS talk I gave, I surprised some people when I told them that Google Earth can open some GPS-related formats like GPX, LOC and others directly; you just need to select the type of files you want to open with the drop-down in the lower-right corner:

open_gpx

But if the waypoints in GPX files come time-stamped, either with the time you created them in the field or in a program, Google Earth assumes that you want to use this time-related data, and brings up a time slider in the upper-left-hand corner:

timeslider

The first time you open the file, the time slider will run from start to finish, with waypoints popping up and disappearing as the time indicator hits their creation time. You only see all the waypoints when the time slider has run all the way through to the end. Very annoying.

But it gets worse. If you uncheck the GPS data box in the Places pane to hide the data, then check it again, you’ll see nothing at all except the time slider:

timeslider1

Hitting the play button on the time slider will make the waypoints appear and disappear quickly, and at the end the only waypoint visible will be the last one created; the time slider will look like this:

timeslider2

To see all the waypoints, you’ll need to move the “start-time-extent” slider all the way to the left:

timeslider3

Same behavior if you save the data permanently to “My Places”. This is pretty retarded behavior; I hope Google adds the option to turn off time-related data display when it’s not wanted. Until then, I banged together a simple Windows-only program called GPXTimeStripper that will remove all time-related data from a GPX file (KML files, too, although this may not work in every case). Download the file at this link; it’s a zipped stand-alone executable. Run the program (won’t win any interface awards):

Click on the main button, choose the GPX or KML file you want to process, and the program will remove the time data from the file, and save it with “_TS” appended to the filename. You’ll get a pop-up box with the name and location of the new file, which should always be the same location as the input file. If the pop-up becomes annoying (which it will), check the box in the lower-left-hand corner to turn it off. Help button takes you to this page; Exit does what you’d expect.

No real checks for overwriting older files, and may not work on every file correctly (report bugs). Use at your own risk. BTW, Google, would it kill you to have KML files created in Google Earth terminate in CR-LF instead of just LF? It would simplify the job of reading them in correctly.

Garmin Basecamp Revisited

Published by

Leszek Pawlowicz

in Garmin, GPS and GPX. 4 Comments

It’s been a bit more than a year since I first looked at Garmin’s free Basecamp software, and wasn’t terribly impressed. I did say, “Hopefully future versions will be snappier, and add more features.” I just did a GPS presentation to a local hiking group, and in preparation for that took a full look at the latest version of Basecamp (3.05). In short, it’s a major improvement over the first release; it’s now better than Garmin’s classic MapSource program for uploading/downloading/managing data. It’s so improved that it wouldn’t be a bad basic choice for creating data for use with non-Garmin GPS models; just export the data to GPX format, then use a program like EasyGPS to send it to your model. As an added bonus, it’s available in both PC and Mac versions.

Probably the most important addition is an associated tool called MapInstall, that lets you upload Garmin-compatible maps to your GPS unit. Prior to this, the only complete tool for doing this was Garmin’s MapSource program, only available if you purchased a Garmin mapset, or Garmin’s Trip and Waypoint Planner software, sold for $30. If you wanted to use free mapsets like those available at the GPS File Depot, you were out of luck; now, you’re not. MapInstall isn’t as good for uploading and managing maps as MapSource, but it should be good enough for most people:

mapinstall

But there are lots of other useful new features:

Faster and less buggy than earlier versions
Tiled (poster) printing of installed mapsets
Support for Garmin Custom Maps and Birdseye Imagery
Better route management
Conversion of tracks to simplified routes
Better waypoint, track and route management
Better export to Google Earth
Ability to import mapsets pre-installed on some GPS models

Still some issues left, some kind of weird:

Import of KML files is iffy
Help file is still incomplete
Only supports USB-interface models; older serial models are out of luck (though you can still export data and use EasyGPS to upload it
There are features listed on the update/download page that don’t seem to exists, e.g. “Added printing of USGS Quads and other public land survey areas.”
Be nice to be able to simplify tracks and still keep them as tracks; now, you can only save a simplified route.
Basecamp insists on exporting waypoints to GPX, Google Earth format with a timestamp even if you’ve created them in the program (and don’t want a timestamp).

I did some Basecamp demo videos as a reference to what I presented at my talk, and have put them up on YouTube; not terribly exciting, but maybe you’ll find them useful.