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Technology

Beauty and the beast

So after months of speculation and delayed launch dates, the i-tunes phone is released – and its a lemon !
An ugly old Motorola phone, the MotoROKR phone does not allow you to download music via a mobile network, you cannot sync songs using bluetooth and it has a Motorola user interface – remember no two Motorola phones have the same UI !!

Even during Steves Jobs demo, he came unstuck trying to use it.

The new iPod nano of the other hand is just THE thing to lust after, a very small flash-memory based iPod photo – I bought mine today at the Apple Store in London and I can’t stop just picking it up and playing with it – the design is just magical !!

If anyone every needed a lesson in the importance of industrial design this is it – I expect the iPod to continue to dominate the market, everybody will want a nano, and the ROKR will disappear.

5 replies on “Beauty and the beast”

Hi Ed,

Publishing GIS data into KML does provide a very cool way of visualizing it. We made a available a KML plugin for our FME product a couple of weeks ago (see http://www.safe.com/google for details) — it can take data from any GIS format (including MasterMap) and output it to KML. Some of our early adopters are doing great things with this — one of them had buildling heights for his data and the results are very impressive. We hope to be able to showcase this soon. I’m on vacation now in Switzerland and am carting around a GPS on all my hikes — when I get home I plan to publish my trip as a set of KMLs, possibly with links to relevant photos in them. High geek potential.

One interesting thing is that the registration is almost never “on” on the sets I’ve seen, but on the other hand, maybe for Google Earth visualization purposes close is good enough.

Hi Dale,

Hope Switzerland in fun, I know what you are saying about the registration issues we have seen them also with OS data.

ed

Ed,
Your ‘throwaway’ about heighting the MM polygons highlights a curious anomaly. In general OSGB’s provision of framework data and services equals or surpasses those of its peers, with the exception of 3D vector data. There are third party projects such as Qinetiq’s enAble3D and UCL’s 3D city models for Virtual London but no OS product or general coverage. By contrast there is much activity and availabilty in Europe. Once again GML/XML is the ‘ubiquitous enabler’. The lead in the relevant GML profile (CityGML – see http://www.citygml.org) is coming from Europe. Incidentally Snowflake’s Go Publisher also supports CityGML.
Can we expect any OS provision of 3D vector and model data sometime? Probably not the forum to ask the question, but your remark does rather ask for it!

Peter Woodsford

Peter,

At some point I’m sure the OS will provide a height attribute to MasterMap topo data but as yet we have not announced any plans to do so, or given any timeframe.

It is quite a major data capture exercise to do this consistently for the whole country.

ed

Just supposing….

“Dateline xyz-month 2006…

Today Apple announced the launch of the gPod, the next generation personal navigation system based on the original Apple nano chassis and popular TomTom mapping software.

This second reincarnation of the nano sports an on board 16 channel GPS receiver (NEMERIX chip set), mini-SD socket capable of supporting up to 5GB of map data and/or ‘traditional’ media including podcasts and conventional MP3s and a 3.5mm stereo audio/FM transmitter jack“

My Barclaycard is on standby here Ed.. Can’t help thinking yours is too..

Oh, and why no mobile phone in the above equation? Easy peasy…of late I’ve using an Orange SPV C500 with TomTom 5 and a Bluetooth GPS receiver (works really well) and, you know what?

The chuffin’ phone always rings just as that nice TomTom lady is about to tell which of the FIVE roundabout exists to take…WITHOUT FAIL!!.

Maybe what I really need is a mobile phone that is just that – a phone (and nothing else..)

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