Moving from Symbian to Android: Where Am I (GPS Navigation)?

One redeeming feature of the Nokia ecosystem is the turn-by-turn, spoken street name, FREE navigation. Later Nokia Maps versions running on Symbian 3 continue to offer class-leading navigation, that give some dedicated GPS devices a run for their money. Nokia's venture into Windows Phone is showing those users what Symbian users have been enjoying for years now.

Let me say from the outset, you will not find a free app like Nokia Maps in the Android ecosystem.

Android uses Google Maps (not even going to hyperlink this) by default. And that's great, if you have a consistent 3G connection, and a fat data allowance. Yes, you can download "offline" map data now, but it is only for a 10 mile (16 km) radius. What happens if you want to do an interstate road trip and not get slammed for data? Not good enough as a Nokia Maps replacement.

Waze is an interesting free solution that relies on other Waze users to provide mapping telemetry. If you live in the US or Europe with lot of other Waze users, you will likely love this app. If you live in Australia, you're probably not going to like it. Not good enough as a reliable mapping solution.


Android Solution:  Sygic


The closest I've come to decent mapping for Android users is Sygic. Sygic provides accurate, offline maps for Australia and New Zealand.

Turn-by-turn, spoken street name navigation is also provided.

Sygic's interface is lovely. Simple, but also incredibly powerful when you need it. Add Points of Interest (POI) from within the application. Or import POI from any compatible source as an overlay to the offline maps.

The only downside of Sygic is the maps for Australia and New Zealand cost about $30. Once you buy the maps, you continue to receive updates forever (perpetual license). That's a lot cheaper than purchasing a dedicated GPS and having to update maps every three years. From what I can tell, if you change or upgrade your Android device, the licence is transferable as well.

But you need to plan ahead and check that points of interest (POI) are present on the map. If not, you can add them, and they are persistent in subsequent searches. You'll probably find that some other Sygic users have uploaded photos of POIs in the area you need, so if you have been there before and know the basic map geography, the photographs help you pick the right location to navigate to with or without a POI entry.

The 7 Day trial of this app is not really long enough: it needs to be a full month. If Sygic offered a month trial on this product, I would not have installed a cracked version because I could test it over multiple trips in the month and see how incredibly worth the $30 it is. Hope you read this Sygic (and I will be making a purchase shortly for the record).

You also have to pay extra for live traffic alerts, per year (ouch). But as one of my colleagues suggested, just fire up google maps when you hit a traffic jam and take a look at the way ahead on the free traffic alert system built-in to Google Maps.


Dishonourable Mention:  Navigon

I only stumbled across this solution by accident, after heading to the SGS2 product site and glancing at the Australia product features of the SGS2. It listed Navigon as being offered as the navigation solution, but the app was nowhere to be found on the device. You would think it should have been at least already installed when you set up the phone or something?

Turns out that you can get completely free Australian and New Zealand Navigon maps for being a Samsung customer. The paid version of Navigon for non-Samsung customers costs upwards of $60, so I see this as a real advantage of being a Samsung customer.

At least that is what I thought...

It all started when I attempted to download the maps initially.

WARNING: When you are downloading the maps initially, do not navigate away from the download screen. Your download will be abandoned, because Navigon in their wisdom do not allow the download to continue in the background, or provide any "WARNING: You are about to stop your download" PEBKAC prevention.

So I managed to download the maps the second time, and start the app. The GPS lock took ages, in direct line of sight of the cloudless blue sky. After 5 minutes, I just closed the app. When I opened the map view, it was like something from GPS units of 4 years ago. Blocky maps, with horrible map panning that would re-draw as you drag the map around.

Navigon and the maps are free. The add-ons are not. There are three to choose from, which give you the same turn by turn guidance and dashboard stuff as Sygic does, and one for Traffic (which is an extra, yearly subscription service in Sygic). The real sour point here is that to purchase all four will cost you more than purchasing an Australian/New Zealand license of Sygic (at current exchange rates).

T O T A L   F A I L

If you need offline maps for Australia and New Zealand, and own a Samsung device, do not even bother with Navigon. Utter rubbish. I'm removing it as I write this blog.

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Moving from Symbian to Android: Let the music play

With Symbian 3, there were not many choices for music player software. You really only had the default "Music" software. And even if you could find an alternative music player that offered a similar feature set, you were likely not able to set it as the default player due to Symbian's frustrating "our default apps are better than yours, nyaaaah" attitude.

There was nothing wrong with that Symbian 3 music player. While it was basic, it did have a lovely cover-flow feature (quite iPod like, actually), and good support for many proprietary CODECs.

As soon as I started the Samsung Music Player on the Galaxy S2, I thought to myself "well, I'll be looking for another music player very quickly". The default player is a steaming pile of excrement. I can't really put it any other way, without using stronger language.

In my quest to find an immediate replacement for the player, I chose WinAmp. It is free, it is not that shiny, but it does the job much better than the dookie that is the Samsung Music Player. If you like to use WinAmp on your PC, you'll likely love the fact that you will be able to wirelessly sync your music to your Android phone.

For a really excellent summary of players you can use on Android, check out Joshua Goldman's CNET post: Best Android Music Players. I'm not going to repeat them all here because Joshua has said it all really. For those who want the tl:dr version, choose PlayerPro, PowerAMP, or Audiogalaxy.

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Moving from Symbian to Android: O Sleeping Screen, where art thou

I still do miss Sleeping Screen, the impressive free app that turns your Nokia AMOLED phone screen into a minimalistic notification system for your sleeping phone (when your phone is on stand-by).

I followed this app when it was just a promising Nokia Beta Labs offering, until it's maturity into the Nokia Store. The great thing about Sleeping Screen is you get an overview of missed calls, texts, and calendar alarms on your standby screen.

The killer feature offered by this app was that you could use the provided converter to make any photo or image to a reduced-pixel image. Because AMOLED can turn on individual pixels, and requires no LED light source, the pictures consume very little battery, while still offering quite amazing resolution. This gives you ultimate flexibility as to what pictures you want refreshing on your standby screen. You can see some results on my post about Sleeping Screen.

Many Android handsets feature a multi-coloured LED that gives you a basic indication of what notification type you have waiting for you on your handset. In my case, the Samsung Galaxy S2 does not have a LED.

Solution: NoLED.

While NoLED does not give you screensaver images, it gives you everything else.

It will notify you of missed calls, SMS, email, and other apps with small coloured dots. The dots move around the screen (configurable).

You can expand the dots to icons (similar to sleeping screen), app thumbnails (where available). It will even tell you how much charge is left on your phone when a notification is received, so you can do away with the battery widget on your home screen. You can even go so far as to instruct NoLED to sleep between a time range so it doesn't wake you up at night.

In short, NoLED is ultra-configurable. And it is free. You can opt to donate a small amount to the developers for their excellent work. I likely will.

This app is the best solution I've found to solve the gap between Sleeping Screen and the default lock screen on the Samsung Galaxy S2. If you have found another app that is better, please comment so other readers can benefit from your experience.

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Moving from Symbian to Android

I'm tired of Symbian, but I also love things like Sleeping Screen and Nokia Maps. What do I choose to make the transition as friendly as possible?

Don't worry: I was there about two weeks ago. I upgraded from a Nokia N8 to a Samsung Galaxy S2 (SGS2), and have spent the last few weeks tweaking and researching apps and services that give me the functionality I was used to on Symbian, and in many cases offer functionality better than Symbian.  If you're considering the jump, read my posts in the coming days about my findings so far.

Topics I'll be covering are:

• Notifications (Sleeping Screen vs NoLED)
• Maps and Navigation (Nokia Maps vs Google Maps, Waze, and Sygic)
• Music (Default app vs [insert any number of choices here])
• Apps (This will be a short post from the Nokia perspective...)
• Other miscellaneous things I think of after writing this blog ;)

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SyncML Procedure for Symbian 3 Handsets

I had to use SyncML for my contacts on my Nokia N8, because we only have one Mail for Exchange profile available. I also couldn't sync multiple calendars, so I'm using GoogaSync for that.

To help others, I have written the full, verified procedure to set up SyncML on your Symbian 3 device. Correct at time of writing this Sidewiki entry. It's on my blog:

http://jaredleonmorgan.blogspot.com/2011/01/sync-google-contacts-and-calendar-on.html

If anyone is reading this from google you have CC-BY-SA to add the procedure to the front page of the SyncML website so other Nokia users can benefit.

Cheers

Jared
in reference to: Nokia N-Series or E-Series (Symbian S60 3rd Edition) : Device Set Up Instructions - Google Mobile Help (view on Google Sidewiki)

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Sync Google Contacts and Calendar on Symbian 3 devices without using Mail for Exchange (MfE)

So you have a shiny N8 or other Symbian 3 (S^3) device.  You use Google to manage your contacts, calendar, and to-do items on your PC/Mac/Linux/Whatever, and what that information synchronised to your phone.

You know that Mail for Exchange (MfE) on your S^3 device can do this for you, but you also know there are limitations:

• MfE will only show your primary Google calendar, and will not support shared calendars.
• MfE is limited to one instance on your device.  That means that if you need to access your work account, then you have to make a hard decision about what to choose.

There's a way, but I'll say that it is not free like MfE.  There are two things you need to do to avoid using your precious MfE account.

Sync Calendar using GoogaSync

Download and install GoogaSync on your S^3 device.  This application is a paid application, and at the time of writing costs about US$20.  

Tip: I'm sure you could get this price down a bit if you search for "GoogaSync Discount Coupon Code" on google. ;)

You get this from the Nokia Store as a trial for 14 days, by which time you will see it "does what is says on the tin".  Set up could not be simpler, and you can schedule your sync schedule.  It runs as a service, so it just synchronises your contacts at a frequency that suits you throughout the day. No need to have the application open.

Sync Contacts using Google SyncML

While Google offers Google Sync over MfE, you also have the option to synchronise your Contacts (and *only* your contacts) using SyncML.

Basically any handset with SyncML compatibility can use this service, however each handset has slightly different Sync setup procedures.

There are excellent resources on the Google SyncML site, and a procedure exists for Symbian 60 v3 and v5, but I think they are still catching up a bit with Symbian 3 (feel free to use this verified procedure, Google).

For those of us on S^3, here are the step-by-step instructions for our devices.

I have verified this procedure on my Nokia N8, which currently has the PR 1.0 launch firmware.

1. On the N8, press the Menu button.
2. Tap Settings > Connectivity > Data Transfer > Sync
3. Tap Options > New sync profile
4. In the wizard, tap Start.
5. For the Profile Name, specify any name you wish (for example, "Gmail Contacts SyncML") and tap Next.
6. For the Server Version, select "1.2", and tap Next.
7. For Applications in Sync, select "Contacts" only.
   Important: Google only offers Contact sync. Enabling other options will cause sync failure.
8. For Contacts Database, specify "contacts", and tap Next.
   Important: The word "contacts" must be lower-case in order to sync with google servers.
9. For Data Bearer, select "Internet", and tap Next.
10. For Host Address, specify "https://m.google.com/syncml". Ensure you specify "https" for a secure connection. Tap Next.
11. For Server ID, specify "Google", and tap Next.
    Important: The word "Google" must be title-case in order to sync with google servers.
12. For Username, specify your full gmail account name (for example, fullusername@gmail.com) and tap Next.
13. For Password, specify your gmail password, and tap Next.
14. The wizard informs you that you have successfully set up the basic settings required.  Acknowledge this message.  The wizard closes.
15. You are now back at the Sync main screen, and your new profile is displayed.
16. Tap Options > Synchronise.
17. Wait until the Sync is complete.
18. Verify the sync by opening your Contacts and reviewing the list in comparison to your Google contacts on a PC. 

Summary

You don't have to use your only MfE account if you are prepared to spend just a little cash on alternative solutions.  

Credits

Thanks to the author of this post, who alerted me to the fact that SyncML was an available option for Symbian.  Thanks also to the many forum posts I've read (too many to individually credit) that talked about GoogaSync.

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