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hey all,
so my old phone finally died recently and i was forced to undergo the customary ass-raping that is a mobile handset replacement. i seriously considered buying the exact same model i had via eBay but all the auctions were for "refurbished" phones from fly-by-night vendors who didn't offer much in the way of a warranty. i still almost went that way, so angry am i over the fact that the industry consistently pretends that they are incapable of making a simple data swap between phones or making the games that were compatible with one's old handset run properly on a new handset.
<mini-rant #1>
<mini-rant #2>
ok, now that that's out of my system (sort of) i will talk for a second about the phone that i have and what i'd like to hopefully make it do. cel phone gurus, i call upon you to advise me. (cyber junkie... i'm looking for you. do you even have a forums account?)
i opted to stick with Sanyo since i've consistently gotten very long life out of their devices despite the fact that i consistently kick the hell out of them. in keeping with both trends, i bought a model 7050 milspec unit. thus far, i love it. it does everything that my old phone did (save for playing the versions of sudoku and tetris that i used to have, grrrr) but also supports "always vibrate" mode (which really kicks ass... one doesn't have to choose between volume or vibration for the ringers) and autonomous GPS.
it is this last point that interested me the most. even if one isn't on the network the phone still can track GPS and use said data. the only problem... it can output NMEA data to USB or BlueTooth... but there's no native support for simple LAT/LONG data to the screen!
does anyone know of a simple and non-subscription software product for cel phones that will just display GPS coordinates and other such basic details? i don't need to store waypoints or all that fancy jazz. i just wanna be able to hike or look for a geocache perhaps without attaching my phone to a laptop.
thus far, all the software i've found that can interface with the phone's GPS engine is corporate employee-tracking and fleet-management software. i don't need all that. i just wanna know where i am every so often.
any thoughts or suggestions?
so my old phone finally died recently and i was forced to undergo the customary ass-raping that is a mobile handset replacement. i seriously considered buying the exact same model i had via eBay but all the auctions were for "refurbished" phones from fly-by-night vendors who didn't offer much in the way of a warranty. i still almost went that way, so angry am i over the fact that the industry consistently pretends that they are incapable of making a simple data swap between phones or making the games that were compatible with one's old handset run properly on a new handset.
<mini-rant #1>
it's not like i live on my goddamn phone or sit there, pecking at the keys constantly to amuse myself. however, when i go through the trouble of paying the extra $4 for the "no expiration" version of Sudoku or something, as opposed to being slowly bled dry one dollar per month, it really pisses me off to no end when i discover that a newly-purchased phone pretends to not run these applications and i have to buy a new version of the couple puzzle games and tetris all over again
</mini-rant #1><mini-rant #2>
but the real killer, as far as i'm concerned, is the fact that around here phone books and so forth don't port over easily. i'm sure that in other areas of the world, where actual free markets and unlocked devices have made the industry's products fucking amazing, one can instantly dump all important data to an XML file for import to a new device. here, however, you have to stand around while the techs in the back room fumble with your old phone for 30 minutes (that is, unless they're super-lazy and just try to pretend that your data port isn't working) in an attempt to get some of your phone numbers to the new device. and forget about getting things like photos, entries into a calendar, or device settings. police and feds can take a phone and dump every last goddamn bit of data off of it in almost no time, but the people at the actual industry stores don't have anything close to that capability. christ.
</mini-rant #2>ok, now that that's out of my system (sort of) i will talk for a second about the phone that i have and what i'd like to hopefully make it do. cel phone gurus, i call upon you to advise me. (cyber junkie... i'm looking for you. do you even have a forums account?)
i opted to stick with Sanyo since i've consistently gotten very long life out of their devices despite the fact that i consistently kick the hell out of them. in keeping with both trends, i bought a model 7050 milspec unit. thus far, i love it. it does everything that my old phone did (save for playing the versions of sudoku and tetris that i used to have, grrrr) but also supports "always vibrate" mode (which really kicks ass... one doesn't have to choose between volume or vibration for the ringers) and autonomous GPS.
it is this last point that interested me the most. even if one isn't on the network the phone still can track GPS and use said data. the only problem... it can output NMEA data to USB or BlueTooth... but there's no native support for simple LAT/LONG data to the screen!
does anyone know of a simple and non-subscription software product for cel phones that will just display GPS coordinates and other such basic details? i don't need to store waypoints or all that fancy jazz. i just wanna be able to hike or look for a geocache perhaps without attaching my phone to a laptop.
thus far, all the software i've found that can interface with the phone's GPS engine is corporate employee-tracking and fleet-management software. i don't need all that. i just wanna know where i am every so often.
any thoughts or suggestions?
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