the I PHONE thread

[discomuzz]

This is a good app for bushwalking.

Great. Looking forward to tracking my progress on it next time I am bush.

Some people have complained about the Bing maps. How did you find them?

[mikehzz]

This is a good app for bushwalking. I used it up the Flinders Ranges last October. As well as the maps being good the distance travelled and time taken was handy so too is the ability to take photos which are tagged to the location.

I have Motion X but it seems to download the maps as you go? Have you used it with off line maps ?

Mike

[discomuzz]

I have Motion X but it seems to download the maps as you go? Have you used it with off line maps ?

Mike

Nah! Haven't tried yet. One thing I did read though was that you can 'explore' the area you are intending to go to before you leave. By doing this it loads all the maps you will need and if you zoom in on the areas the 'zoomed' images are cached as well as the larger maps and therefore you should be able to get around in areas with no phone coverage.

Would be interested in hearing from people with more experience than me on the issue.

[DaveF]

Nah! Haven't tried yet. One thing I did read though was that you can 'explore' the area you are intending to go to before you leave. By doing this it loads all the maps you will need and if you zoom in on the areas the 'zoomed' images are cached as well as the larger maps and therefore you should be able to get around in areas with no phone coverage.

Would be interested in hearing from people with more experience than me on the issue.

Yes I am pretty sure thats how it works. Maximise the cache and it will store the maps. The detail is not as good as a topo map but still useful. It has a breadcrumb style feature so you can retrace your steps as well. Interestingly the iphone battery lasted the same amount of time as my garmin Nuvi760 battery.

Cheers
David

[p38arover]

How expensive is it to download maps on the fly?

From a new item:

''I've heard of someone getting a bill for $23,000 after being overseas for a period of three weeks. It just turned out that all the data, satellite navigation and emails were being billed at a very high roaming rate. The more typical examples are bills of $1000 plus, when the customer was paying what they thought was their contract rate of $100 to $200 a month.''

[discomuzz]

Geez Ron. That's a tough one.

With Sygic you get all of Oz and NZ with the $80.00 purchase price plus free upgrades for life. So, shouldn't be an issue 'locally'.

Overseas roaming would have to depend on your carrier plan and doesn't really reflect the cost of the software.

Would suggest that the owners of the multiple thousand dollar bills haven't done their homework.

The idea would be to hook-up with the maps site when your are O.S., roam and zoom online for free and then just use GPS when actually on-site.

[disco_mitch]

i just bought an audio cable so now i can play the music on my i phone through my stereo wow this things great i used to get sick of burning cds so been listening to the radio for to long so i put some music on my i phone and now its blaring out my stereo

[Outlaw]

Saw an ipod dock car stereo pop up in one of the recent catalogs... the front flips down and the whole ipod/phone slips in out of harms way Not quite sure how you'd answer a call though so probably more for ipods

[Captain_Rightfoot]

A guy at work bought a ipod touch the other day. He said it was crap. I say "why?". He says - "Because my wife wants an iphone now".

In other news did we all see that telstra has some very nice prepaid plans now? If you own your phone they are great. The catch is you do the one month thing and get the free calls, and then use your credit to buy your data pack!

Mactalk discussion.

[Ranga]

In other news did we all see that telstra has some very nice prepaid plans now? If you own your phone they are great. The catch is you do the one month thing and get the free calls, and then use your credit to buy your data pack!

Mactalk discussion.

This is what I did for the wife's iPhone. Bought an unlocked one from the Apple store, and a Telstra pre-paid sim for $10. Then bought a $40 prepaid top-up. This gave her 150mins talk time, 150 SMS, and $40 credit to spend on "Plus Packs". One of the plus packs is 100MB data for $10. Others include more talk time or more SMS messages.

This means she can buy up to 400MB data, plus talk for 150 minutes, plus send 150 SMS messages all for $40. Good deal I reckon. Only downside is the talk and SMS only lasts a month from purchase of the top-up, however the data lasts 1 month from the data pf purchase.