Swing low, sweet chariot, going to carry me home

Last week, I really got a premise of how cool it is to have ubiquitous web. I went to a birthday party at a friend's house nearby Principe Real, that's in downtown Lisbon, but I left after the subway's working hours. So I had two (cheap) choices left. Either come back in some late hours bus, or, return home afoot. I like walking, and I like Lisbon very much, so I went for the sporty latter. As I live in Alto de Sao Joao, I was on for a one-hour walk, at least. You can see on the map below the usual route I would have taken.

As you can see, that's a typical automobile route. It's not optimized for pedestrians.

Now, the trick is, what's the best way for coming back home? Even I, who live in Lisbon for more than 20 years, don't know all its secrets. My mental mapping for tracing a route simply goes by stitching familiar places together until I can link point A to point Z. However, as I lose my sense of geometry doing so, I can never know if my mental stitching is the best route (i.e. minimizes time). Aha, but that's when I would emerge with my ubiquitous web reaching device. Grasping the HTC p3300 in my pocket (yeah, I know, that's lame publicity...), I quickly open the Time2Me service and try to discover the best streets available. However, in the big city, with all these walls and buildings, don't expect to get a working GPS signal so soon. Oh, well, will have to do without the GPS. But that's as well, because I can really easily locate where I am, as I'm really familiar with Lisbon's city map. And besides, it's more fun, perhaps, that way.

So, after a few seconds loading the map on screen, I quickly stroll around the city streets with my touch pen, and quickly identify some streets that link familiar places in yet unknown ways to me. It's like entering warp zones in Super Mario Bros :)

And so, I started my 40 minutes journey back home, with nothing else on me but my lended pda, saving me around 20 minutes time, and making me explore news routes through my beloved Lisbon. Below you can see the route I took.

Quite a bit different from the initial one I had in my mind. The interesting part is that I strolled streets yet unknown to me!

I have to say that I really felt that this single experience of walking through my city, with a pocket map, was really special. I had the feeling I could easily explore every city in the whole world without ever getting lost, and always finding the best route to get there. Furthermore, browsing a map from a pda is much more pleasant than a real map. Those large pieces of paper really aren't practical on the field. With a pda for browsing maps, zooming in and out, and sliding to the sides, I really felt a little bit more into the future.

However, at some point, I had to reload the Time2Me app, but, as it's only in beta, I couldn't stroll the map: it would send an acoustic "beep" whenever I touched the screen. Couldn't know why. Even if I would reload the app. As it takes a couple of minutes to reset the pda, I'd rather use an alternate tool so I switched to Google maps that proves to be more robust and has a working cell tower locator (within 1700 meters radius for Lisbon) that works most of the time; more often than gps at least. The maps are similar in quality. The loss is, I can't communicate with the Time2Me community, and I can't flash geo-located pictures.

There's a couple of things I'd like to mention that would really make the experience a better one.

• Lisbon is very hilly, and so It would really be useful for walkers, strollers and foot explorers to get some geodesics as an additional layer in visual earth or google maps.


• Time2Me is great to trace routes between places and/or peoples, as is Google maps for places only, but, If it could search locations or get directions by street address or postal code as I do with google maps that would be a lot better as a complementary alternative.


• Neither Time2Me nor Google Maps trace routes for walkers. Only for cars on the road.


• A public transportation route replying with the bus numbers and the subway stations to take would also be a great thing! Especially if they would be linked with flashes or flickr photos of the emblematic spots of the city.


• The drop down menus appearing on the map in Time2Me should be context relevant, If I click on a friend in the map or on a flag in the map, I'd like to see only the relevant actions. I don't like to send a message to a flag. Also I'd like to be able to interact more with the map on map view i.e. I'd like to set where I am directly from the map, and not necessarily at a flag location. This is very useful as 90% of my time I don't get gps connectivity because, either I'm indoors, either I'm near a building, either the pda is in my pocket. The gps is great for outdoors activities, or on a car or boat dashboard. I don't think that gps works much for a city walker. Relying on cell tower location works more often in the big city. At least, that's my experience...

(disclosure: TimeBI borrowed to me the HTC p3300 so I could test for them the Time2Me free service)

My first day as timebi tester

Hello,
As I've just started to work for TimeBi as a tester, I decided to create this internal blog to write down my experiences as a regular user. I will also post my ideas and my whish-list for cool stuff I'd like to see developed.

After our lunch-meeting (a very nice invitation), Miguel and Andre gave me (lended) an HTC p3300 pda. Nice!
The deal was: I get to use the pda as long as I:

• use time2me (fine with me),
  
• keep providing feedback and write all the good, the bad and the ugly things about time2me aka wizi;
  

So here are my impressions of my first day:

I live in Portugal and I've got a carrier ontract with Optimus. I pre-pay an extra monthly 7.5 euros for 100 MB of GPRS data.
As a complete noob in smartphones and PDA, the first thing I must say is that configuring the pda to connect to the web through GPRS isn't that straightforward. Ok, so the htc p3300 came with windows mobile 6 or WM6. And that's fine.

I have basically two needs with a pda:
i - Access internet (quickly enough),
ii - make phone calls and send sms,

But this htc p3300 also came with a GPS, so I also require to use it as a GPS (which comes in handy for the time2me main app).

Ok, connecting to my wep protected wifi home network was easy. First shot, got through. Nice.

Let's see if I can easily customize the apps for my pda: google maps. Yes. Opera mobile. No. Got some certificate error message. Opera mini. No. Both versions get stuck for some certificate error message. Right.
Let's see if I can access my google apps (gmail, calendar, reader, picasaweb and mymaps). Apparently yes. Sent 1 email to a friend.

The next day, at work. Connecting local wifi. Error, need certificate. Hmmm, how do I import a certificate? Then I try a usb connection with a win XP 64. Can't plugandplay. Hmmm, how do I transfer files? Bluetooth? Got a bluetooth dongle at home. Will try that tonight.

Ok, so let's try gprs instead of wifi. Hmm, got stuck first. Then I went to Optimus site and it helped. I finally managed to activate the gprs web. I put the complete walkthrough in this wiki.

You'll notice I still haven't talked about the time2me service;) That's because the new device learning overhead is rather heavy.

P.S: Oh, and BTW, I did make one phone call to my wife. So the phone works as well. But i miss the hark keyboard just to make a phone call. Also, I'd love to synchronize my gmail contacts with the pda. Can I do that? I guess I'll discover all that in the next weeks. Have a nice week-end...