YiBi's Life|Live Log

One of the first painful things when switching to a new mobile phone is migrating the contact list, especially when you are switch to a totally different brand or platform. Last week I got the iPhone 4 for my wife as Christmas present to replace her Nokia E71.

Prior to the switch, I have already configured the E71 to sync her whole phone book to Google. We are using Google Apps Domain, which is Gmail and all the whole suite of Google Apps, but using my own domain name.

The telco was pretty efficient in activating the micro sim for iPhone 4, which is not expected. We were at the mall and her old SIM card got deactivated and the new card activated, barely one hour after signing up the mobile package. The staff told us it’s going to take 6 hours or more to have the new sim card activated. I’m not complaining though.

Under normal circumstances, having the old sim deactivated means she had to lookup her old phone for contacts and key in into the iPhone if she’s trying to  make a call or send a message. What I did was I configured the iPhone to sync with Google on the spot. Within mins, her whole phonebook was downloaded into the iPhone from Google and the phone is fully functional. No PCs and sync software involved. Cool?

This means I can switch phones anytime, as long as the phone supports ActiveSync. Google has implemented ActiveSync for syncing Email, Phone Book and Calendar. Both Nokia and iPhone supports ActiveSync.

Here’s more information on how I did it.

http://www.google.com/mobile/

Google Sync For Nokia

Google Sync For iPhone

As part of my effort to improve my physical fitness (and appearance), I have been getting into more activities. I’m jogging more regularly and bought a new mountain bike. And being a geek, naturally I would want to visualise the efforts in a geeky manner. So now I’m plotting my routes and paths with Nokia N95. Problem is, carrying my N95 while jogging is not that ideal. It’s relatively too thick and heavy. But I guess I found my solution.

Nokia is pairing up with Polar to provide a package which includes the Polar Heart Rate Monitor. The heart rate monitor will feed data to the N79 via Bluetooth and all the information gets recorded into the Nokia Sports Tracker software on the phone. This is cool, and really what I have been planning to do.

Watch this advertisement for the N79 Active. I do find it abit too cheesy at the ending though, too geeky..hehe..

Nokia N79 Active Advertisement

There’s only 1 problem now. Where can I get this from in Singapore?

Finally, I brought my new bike out after keeping it in the room for about a month. So this is the virgin ride, other than the ride home on the day I bought it. I was supposed to meet up with some friends nearby, so I thought I cycled instead of driving, it’s going to be good exercise.

This was the path I cycled.

Cycling Trail – 19/03/2009

I’m tracking my paths with Google Map so that I know how much I have cycled. Next time round, I will be using the Nokia Sports Tracker to record the path. Was supposed to use that, but there’s serious issues with the battery life if I use the internal GPS. I will write about it another day, so I won’t go into details here.

I have recently start geotagging on my N95 using Shozu. Although it is quite interesting, I still find Shozu’s integration with the N95 slightly incomplete. In a quick try at a specific location, there are discrepancies in the results. Out of 4 pics, 1 of them still ended up not being tagged with the GPS coordinate in the exif. I haven’t really done much trouble shooting, but I think one of the possible reasons could be that GPS fix was lost at that point of time. I guess I got to do some research on GPS and Shozu to see why this occurred. Are there alternatives to Shozu? Or a better way to use Shozu?