Geeky Travel

Compared to our first trip to Spain and
beyond
about 15 years ago, technology is very different now. Back then we
worry about where to find ATM and get money. Now we worry about cell phone,
Internet connection, and GPS. Of these, Internet is not required, so we’ll just
use it wherever we can find access. Cell phone and GPS, however, we would
rather not leave without.

For most of the world one type of phone is good enough—GSM.
But in the US it’s not the
only game in town, and the GSM frequencies used in Spain
and Morocco is not those
used in the US.
For this trip I bought an Iphone
look-alike
on ebay, for about $60 including shipping. And a Garmin GPS.

I9+++ Phone

The new phone turned out to be a geek’s trap, in the sense
that it has a long list of hardware features, and an even longer list of
software glitches, some of them plaintively easy to fix, if only we had the
means to change the code.

Here’s some of the hardware features:

  • Dual
    SIM card, dual standby. This is meant to save people money, so one can,
    say, receive signal from an International phone call with the home phone
    number, and yet in most cases choose to use a local SIM card to make local
    calls. A friend tells me that the phone must have two radios to support
    this feature.
  • Quad band. Meaning it supports all GSM frequencies, and thus can work in the US as well as abroad.
  • Two
    cameras, one facing the front and the other facing the back. These are low
    resolution and low quality cameras, not something to replace the real
    thing with.
  • WiFi
    and Blue Tooth. The WiFi radio is only capable of extremely low data
    rates, so this is not a fatter data pipe, only a potential money saver.
    The phone’s native WAP browser is very limited, and yet no other browser
    that I’ve tried on it (so far I’ve tried three or four) can see the WiFi
    connection.
  • SD
    card slot.
  • Replaceable
    battery.
  • Compass.
    The software is badly documented, but I eventually figured out how to get
    it to work. Related to the compass function, there is a Mecca Finder, but
    sane-minded Muslins may want to avoid relying on it, as it seems to give
    random directions.
  • G-force
    sensor. Only in a half-working calculator can I verify that the phone can
    sense which direction is up. And only on the opening screen can I verify
    that the phone can sense shaking.
  • FM
    radio. Of very bad quality.

And here is a short list of the most egregious software
issues:

  • The
    phone numbers displayed is in green color, on a slightly different green
    background. And I haven’t found a place to change the color of either.
  • The
    internal browser cannot handle most web pages. And its home page is Google
    in Chinese, even if I set the phone’s language to English. And for some
    Google services (like simple weather inquiry), you must start in English.
  • For
    most key input, the editable field is on a different page (for example,
    it’s not on the Google page that you enter the search item). Even worse,
    to end the input, you are forced to go to another page to say “Done”!
  • Once
    you’re connected to a WiFi network, the phone doesn’t automatically
    remember it, and yet you cannot choose to tell it to remember the setting
    either. You have to program the parameters in at a different place!

In any case, it seems that nowadays phone hardware is
practically worth nothing, and all the money is made on the software. And I’m
working at a place that makes hardware. A glimpse of the brave new world ahead!

Garmin GPS

Previously we have a Magellan GPS. It works reasonably well.
But the problem is that it does not come with European maps, and it is not
extensible. So for this trip we got a Garmin, one with pre-installed maps for
both North America and Europe. But extra map
for Morocco
is another $110, or just about the price of the whole GPS.

Garmin GPS is not without disadvantages compared to
Magellan, but it is a semi-open system, which is a huge advantage. This
openness is appreciable in two ways: one can use it to grab track data, so that
it can be used to make maps in cases where the road was never mapped before;
and one can give it supplemental data, data that is not from the device
manufacturer. It’s this latter feature that gives us the alternate route to a
map of Morocco.

As it turned out, there is a wiki of maps of the world, Open Street Maps. This is where
everyone’s GPS traces can be made available to the world, and this is where you
can make a map of your own. With it, I made a map of Morocco, and loaded it to my Garmin
GPS. It’s not commercial quality by any stretch of imagination, but it does
contain most major roads.

Previously
I mentioned
that I had difficulty with Google maps in planning our travels
in Morocco.
I also tried the same plan with the Garmin GPS, equipped with the Morocco map I created
myself. So far I found a couple of issues. One is that there are no street
numbers, and very few points of interest. Another is that locations are transliterated
from Arabic, and the spellings are terribly inconsistent with anything we read
in English. Yet another is that a part of certain road which is classified as
national highway in other maps is unclassified, and consequently Garmin would
not route us through it. For this last shortcoming, I’m tempted to change the Open
Street Maps data to “upgrade” the road in question. I was stopped by my wife,
who argued that without ever travelling on it first, I’d be cheating myself and
others by doing so.

And that is hard to a geek, being forced to not do
something you think is perfectly doable. It’s right next to being forced to
watch someone folding a road map the wrong way.

Oh, talking about maps, we will get a set of paper maps. Just
in case.

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