Category: Handheld

Honest, it was purely coincidental that I booked a hotel room in Boston that’s three blocks from an Apple mega store. But, sure, we checked out the iPad opening day phenomenon, and the scene was actually impressive.  Out on the sidewalk, happy new owners showed them off to friends and the media, while others waited in lines to pick up preordered units or to place orders.  Inside iPad classes were underway and images of new iPad apps lined all three floors. Most important, there were lots of iPads online, loaded with apps, and easy to try out as long as you wanted, and they are nifty (as you can read in umpteen places). But the abundant and generally well informed staff were not able to answer my main question, which, in fact, has become my to-buy-or-not-buy line in the sand…

“Gaumy” is great Maine word for something kind of messy or awkward (there are numerous spellings), and it came to mind when I tested the Dry Case above.  Its various doodads and fairly large size almost completely suck the elegant simplicity right out of an iPhone or an iPod Touch.  However, because you can easily suck the air out of the case, it’s not only exceptionally waterproof, but the screen and even the iPhone camera, still work fine, which is more than can be said for the Otter Case also discussed after the break…

It’s hard to keep up with marine related iPhone apps, and the reviews at Apple’s iTunes Store often don’t help.  The Celestial Compass above, for instance, has seventy 1 or 2 star “this app doesn’t work/sucks” type reviews versus just fifteen positive ratings, even though it does exactly what it purports to do, and that’s not trivial.  Admittedly ‘compass’ may be a confusing name, but this app uses spherical trigonometry and an ephemeris to calculate the bearings (azimuths) of three celestial bodies at your location so you can line one of them up with the screen and thus orient yourself to True North, E, S, W, etc…

How cool is this!  Most of the time we were hiking Long Island over the last two days I had Navionics Mobile 2.2 (East Coast) running on the iPhone and in track mode.  Thus I could use it to check our progress against the trail map (downloadable here).  I also took some iPhone photos of the mossy rich and rugged scenery from within Mobile, which then geo positions them on the chart.  That’s all neat, but the true kicker is that I could easily email the whole track with (reduced) photos to anyone as a KMZ file (only 248k, downloadable here) that can be overlaid on Google Earth as shown above.  Or, with only two touch commands, could post it all on my Facebook page, where it seems to link to a Navionics-served Google Maps file which you may be able to see even if you don’t have Google Earth or don’t know beans about Facebook (like me).  This easy track and photo sharing is great, but in fact the iPhone has been useful in many ways on this cruise…