Phones

(NOTE: I posted this at my Posterous blog, which I use exclusively for photos and for my iPhone Photo-a-Day project. Reposting here as few people have yet to discover http://steveouting.posterous.com!)

So, I’ve made it 15 days straight so far with posting (to my Posterous photo blog) a photograph a day, using only my iPhone4 and its built-in camera. As I’ve gone forward with this little side project, I’ve made some decisions about self-imposed “rules” for my daily photos:

• I will only post photos taken with my phone; no “real” cameras. (This presumes that I don’t lose my phone during the year, and that it doesn’t stop working and require an overnight visit to Apple for repairs! In that case, I’ll switch to my point-and-shoot camera temporarily.)
• I can use any number of iPhone photography and image-manipulation apps.
• Photos will be posted to Posterous from the iPhone and never will their pixels land on my Macbook laptop or any other device before landing on my Posterous blog.

Why am I doing this? Well, I remember giving a talk quite a few years ago to a group of journalism educators and touting the idea that the fledgling, low-quality cameras showing up on mobile phones at the time would, soon enough, become ubiquitous and that the phone-cameras’ quality would improve to be useful as journalistic tools. In those days, I was met with some incredulous looks.

But in 2011, we’re there. The iPhone4 that I carry does not have the best-quality camera among the smartphones on the market, but it’s decent. So I hope to prove that you can produce pretty-good photos with a phone-camera, aided by a number of photography apps that make manipulation and enhancement of photos possible and downright easy on the phone itself. So far, I’ve used these apps:

• Camera+
• ColorSplash
• ToonCamera
• PS Express

And I just purchased SlowShutter and am looking forward to experimenting with blurred-motion effects.

It’s been a worthwhile experiment. At the least, it’s reignited a long-ago interest in and passion for photography. And when I go about my daily activities, I now observe what’s around me looking for photo opportunities — dispensing with my too-often former obliviousness to my surroundings.

On the latest Journalism Now Podcast (where I’m one of the regulars), we interviewed Jacob Colker, founder of a very cool “micro-volunteering” service using the iPhone (and the web).

The Extraordinaries is a brilliant concept in empowering the crowd to do good things. Foremost, the idea is to allow people to use the little bits of spare time they have (riding the bus home, waiting at the DMV, waiting for the movie to start, etc.) to do small bits of volunteering using the Extraordinaries iPhone app. Examples include tagging photos for the Smithsonian or other museums. The San Diego Voice investigative news website is asking people to use the app to record location and photos of city agencies and buildings wasting water during the current drought period.

This app and model of micro-volunteering has potentially huge implications for journalism. Reporters and editors should be thinking about how Colker’s project can help them improve and expand their reporting and research projects. I hope you’ll listen to the interview.

As a cyclist and runner — and iPhone 3G owner — I’ve been eagerly trying out several new fitness trackers that utilize the iPhone’s built-in GPS to track the trails and routes I ride and run. Like a “real” GPS unit, they record speed, pace, distance, elevation gain and loss, and at the end of the workout send the data to a website where you can later look at a map of your route. It’s pretty cool stuff, for a phone.

The first app I tried (and one of the first introduced) was RunKeeper, for which I paid $9.99 to download from the iPhone App Store. I’ve also tried out several free competitors that do pretty much the same thing: Fitnio, Trailguru, and Path Tracker. Peruse the Health and Fitness category of the App Store, and now you’ll find even more fitness-tracking applications, some free and some that cost anywhere from 99 cents up to several dollars. It’s getting really competitive in this little segment of the iPhone apps market.

So I was interested to receive an e-mail yesterday from RunKeeper’s developer, announcing that the app is about to become free. The reason is obvious: The company wants to become a dominant player in the mobile GPS tracker space and build up a large user community. The best way to do that with so many competitors is to give away the application.

Developer Jason Jacobs of Fitness Keeper Inc. says the company will shift to a business model based on selling advertising and possibly premium paid features (to be determined). For now, “We are … foregoing short-term revenues with the hope that our community will get to massive scale.”

I wonder if this will become a trend in the mobile-phone application community? Sure, you can charge if you’ve got an application that’s unique or has very few competitors. But for segments where the phone app market gets flooded with competitors, developers may be forced into the free model.

Well, it’s certainly a nice thing for consumers. We’ll see if companies like Jacobs’ can figure out how to make money from free and survive.

I’ve been playing around with exercise/trail tracking applications for the iPhone recently. All of them are weak, though I think it’s the phone’s GPS and not the software that’s mainly to blame. I hope that some day a smart phone will replace the need to carry a stand-alone GPS unit, but we’re not there yet.

This morning I took a mountain bike ride on the Walker Ranch trail near Bouldler (CO), and I had TrailGuru.com’s iPhone application track the route. The software worked well, and when finished I uploaded the track to the TrailGuru website. Here’s it is:

Steve and Pete’s slow tour of Walker Ranch

There are several problems with the track:

1. Maximum speed: 46mph (umm, no; 20mph hour would be more like it).
2. Total ascent: 4268ft (that would have been a great workout, but the actual trail ascent is around 1750ft).
3. Distance: 8.15mi (my bike odometer and the trail map agree that it’s really 7.5mi).
4. A chunk of the map route shows as blank; that section is in the trees, where GPS didn’t work.

Also, the battery on my iPhone was nearly dead at the end of the trail.

My trusty Garmin GPS unit would have done a much better job — more accurate, and the batteries would last for a much longer ride.

It’s exciting that we’re starting to see smart phones that can work as GPS devices. But at this point the hardware isn’t up to the task even for the short ride that I did this morning, though the software is already getting pretty good.

I especially like TrailGuru, since its website collects tracks from the iPhone as well as tracks uploaded from traditional GPS units. I may still track some short rides with the iPhone, but for long ones I’ll use the Garmin. With TrailGuru, I can store everything in one place.

I’ve also tested RunKeeper, which is similar but not as full-featured as TrailGuru. RunKeeper’s big drawback is that it doesn’t track elevation gain/loss; for me that’s an essential thing. Its developers say they’ll add that soon.

It’s no fault of those app developers, but the other thing that’s a pain is that the application must be running to collect GPS data, so you can’t use the iPhone for anything else (other than to answer a call, which puts the apps on hold while you talk; and you can listen to music using the phone’s iPod functionality, as long as you launch iPod before starting the trail app). The iPhone will work better as a GPS at the point the iPhone operating system supports running more than one application at a time.