First off, this is my 150th blog post, so a mandatory celebratory hug first!! I'd been waiting to review the Nokia 5610 since the day I bought it[3 months back]. And ever since I got my i.Trek M7 Bluetooth GPS module, I couldn't wait anymore. All right here it is..
I asked my mom to get me a new cell phone as my old Nokia 6600 wasn't keeping good health of late. So looking around for a nice phone, I spotted the Nokia 5610 and 5310 Express Music twins. They were catchy with their trademark black and red designs and were pretty new. My only gripe was that they had a S40 OS. This meant that I would have to sacrifice my love for the S60 OS and multi-tasking.
I looked at the Nokia 5700 Express Music but didn't like it's 2MP camera which lacked saturation in the shots it took. This drew my closer to the Nokia 5610 Express Music. It has a 3.2 MP cam with Auto Focus, a glorious 2.2” QVGA screen[240x320] at 16 Million Colors which made for an amazingly vibrant display. It has 3G capabilities with a secondary VGA camera on the front[only for video calling].
The jog-slide[yeah I made that up] on the front of the phone enabled me to switch between the music/video player, FM and active standby screens at a flick of my thumb. Did I mention that the phone supports FM with RDS??
After 3 months of owning it, I cant help but notice the phenomenal build quality. But a side panel did come on and had to be replaced under warranty. I know that ya guys must be thinking: “Hey Sriram, how come you just said that it has an amazing build quality, and then said that the panel came off?”. By the build quality I mean that the phone's feel is itself pretty sturdy. No squeaks or noises from the slide or the back panel[speaking of the back panel, the panel is so thin that I thought that I would break it for when I opened it for the first time.].
Some of the negatives for this phone would be the absence of a S60 based OS[it would make the phone slow though], the front[secondary] camera cannot take pictures or record videos and that support for 4GB SDHC micro SD card could be properly documented[There are reports of some 4GB SDHC micro-SD Kingston and Transcend cards failing to work with this phone]. So Nokia dev team, if you read this[finding this article via Google], please do really “correct” these cons as you have a wonderful wonderful product here.
I can keep singing paeans about my new phone but I have a couple of other topics to touch on. The first is TrekBuddy which is an offline Java based software for use on an Mobile Phone, with or without a GPS[Internal or Bluetooth] and the best feature is that it supports offline maps. Whoohoo!! So I installed the software on my phone and extracted the maps of Chennai from Google Maps with the TrekBuddy GUI Atlas Creator and loaded them onto my smart card. And lo behold, I could see the map of Chennai in varying levels of zoom. The map was so detailed that I could see the tiny street that I live in!! The TrekBuddy supports logging as well[Smart GPX and NMEA]!!
This didn't even remotely quench my thirst so I saved up and bought a $60 i.Trek M7 Bluetooth GPS Device. It is amazing and is soothes my DGPS starved soul with some WAAS, EGNOS, MSAS and RTCM enabled right out of the box. I have to commend Semsons here. They did an amazing job of efficiently and quickly processing and shipping my order.
When I paired the GPS with my cell and started it within TrekBuddy, it was recognized right away. In under a minute, my position was recognized and my position, speed, altitude and acceleration was displayed. The i.Trek is a MTK chipset based unit with the 51 channel firmware upgrade. I found in practice that the cold start and reacquisition times were about 1 min and 5sec on average respectively. Better than a SIRF III set huh??
Anywaz, I couldn't wait to get a test spin, so I switch on the GPS and TrekBuddy and started logging the data. I drove my sister to the school, came home and uploaded the log[NMEA] on to GPS Visualizer's site and I saw my tracks, speed, acceleration at different points.
The GPS was under the seat all the time and it still had a constant 8-11 satellites fix.
I must thank at this outset- Kruch for developing this amazing piece of freeware software[TrekBuddy] without which this wouldn't be possible. Cheers mate!! BTW this must be my biggest post. Yay me!!
Edit: Here are maps for Chennai, India. http://www.mediafire.com/?m4ncdo2dloy
Ripped from Google Maps. From Ennore to ECR and from Sriperumbudur to the Bay of Bengal. Enjoy!! :)
Edit: 17th November 2008 - New maps for Chennai: http://www.sriraminhell.com/2008/11/new-maps-of-chennai-for-trekbuddy.html
21 comments:
Hi,
nice post, thanks! :-) Good luck with your trekking, no matter where - city or wilderness ;-)
nice review...
btw i too am from chennai and wud like to know more about GPS...
is there any charges applicable for using GPS...we shud obviously pay for data transmission between sateliite and gps right ?? if so how much is it ?
Hi Praveen. Nice to see another Chennai-ite here. GPS is a satellite system built and launched by the US. You dont have to pay any kind of charges for GPS and it's data transmission. The only cost is of buying the GPS module. President Ronald Reagan made the GPS system free for public use in 1983 after the KAL 007 incident.
You can find more info on GPS here:
Wiki
Garmin
Trimble
Tech stuff
Hi
I find ur maps ;) and review useful...Thanks a lot..Do u know where can i get good GPS bluetooth device(my mobile is Nokia 6300) in Chennai? BTW Do u know any Geocaching club in Chennai?
Rgds
ED
@Anonymous, There's a severe dearth of cheap GPS devices in India. You can buy them online at Indian stores here:
http://www.mapmyindia.com/
http://www.satguide.in/
http://www.gpsindia.net/
and others, but the prices are almost double and the selection of devices is less. I suggest you buy a GPS at http://www.semsons.com/ . The prices there are pretty cheap. The GPS device that I have: http://www.semsons.com/im7blgpsre51.html is still an amazing deal and I suggest that you buy it. International shipping is about $20 or so. If you have a relative in US, ship it to them and ask them to get it for you..
Nice and useful information. Me from Madurai. Can you tell me the cost of the GPS device? please message me too ssssenth@gmail.com It would be great if you spend two minutes for me. Great Content. Thanks in advance.
@Senthil, It costs about $90 shipped to India. This is excluding customs duties.
Now i have HTC Touch. If i buy the device that you mention. Can i map into my java application for my project.
Also mention by what mean you bought it (Ebay) or you contacted the vendor directly?
You can use this device with any of the mobile phone provided you have Bluetooth and the requisite mapping application. It will certainly work on the HTC Touch with TrekBuddy software[Mentioned in the blog article].
I bought it directly at Semsons[http://www.semsons.com/im7blgpsre51.html] and had it shipped to a relative in the US who then got it back to India.
can u give the maps for new delhi, india? Thanks.
email - c.j@rediffmail.com
Hey Ram,
Your blog is interesting.
Can you give step by step installation Trekbuddy on N 5610(the same as yours) for offline(from GPS) usage. When I copy the jad files in memory card, and open it, it says "certificate invalid according to phone's date".
Thanks
@Anon, can you check if the phone's date and time are correct? Also try re-downloading the jad and jar files from TrekBuddy. If that doesn't work either, try downloading and using an earlier version. Cheers!!
Yes, 1) I downloaded into a PC and then loaded into memory card of the phone.
2) The Phone's date and time are correct with correct IST ( +5.30 hours)
Should I load any other Jar,Jad files.
@Anon, Can you try with the older version? Can you set the read/write/network permissions for the trekbuddy from the phone?
Yes I tried with version 0.9.80 deleting the version 0.9.81. Still I get the same message "certificate invalid according to phone's date".
You might want to ask Kruch at the TrekBuddy forums then.
hey Sriram,
I have installed Trek Buddy in mu Nokia e63. But i am unable to get the chennai maps from trek buddy atlas and your earlier links of chennai maps also dont work.
would be really good if u cud help me wid the atlas creation.
thanks
Did you try this URL: http://www.sriraminhell.com/2008/11/new-maps-of-chennai-for-trekbuddy.html ? I tried downloading from there and it worked properly. Why don't you try again? Cheers!
Thanks a lot Sriram, i'm one hell of a fan of this..!!
Hi, I am trying a lot to atleast execute one midlet jar with certificate on nokia5610. (we-travel, trekbuddy, mgmaps) all show the same f* message "No valid certificate".
@anon, did you try downloading both the .jar and .jad files and try installing with the.jad file?
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