The first Andoid phone was officially announced by Google, HTC and T-mobile. There was not really a “WOW” effect during the presentation. The design is well known from the first Android presentations and the features could have been expected.
Here a small list of facts:
- Processor: Qualcomm® MSM7201A™, 528 MHz
- Memory: 256 MB ROM, 192 MB RAM
- Dimensions: (LxWxT) 117.7 mm x 55.7 mm x 17.1 mm
- Weight: 158 grams (5.57 ounces) with battery
- Display: 3.2-inch TFT-LCD flat touch-sensitive screen with 320 x 480 (HVGA) resolution
- Network: HSDPA/WCDMA, Quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE
- Device Control Trackball with Enter button
- Keyboard: Slide-out 5-row QWERTY keyboard
- GPS: GPS navigation capability with built-in GPS receiver and map software
- Connectivity: Bluetooth® 2.0 with Enhanced Data Rate, Wi-Fi®: IEEE 802.11b/g, HTC ExtUSB™ (11-pin mini-USB 2.0 and audio jack in one)
- Camera: 3.2 megapixel color camera with fixed focus
- Audio: Built-in microphone and speaker
- Battery: Rechargeable Lithium-ion battery, Capacity: 1150 mAh
- Expansion Slot: microSD™ memory card (SD 2.0 compatible)
- Special Features: Digital Compass, Motion Sensor
Some Drawbacks:
- No syncronisation possible with your PC
- You have to provide your data to Google
- No support for Microsoft Exchange Server
- It is not possible to handle multiple Google Accounts
- Except Youtube clips it is not possible to play other video formats.
- No standard 2.5 inch earphone jack (only via USB).
- No big internal storage.
- Online music from Amazon can be downloaded only via WLAN and not via UMTS (3G).
- Text can be entered only via the QERTY keyboard and not on the touch screen.
But beside all this drawbacks the good thing is that Android is open-source and all software based drawbacks will be eliminated by the community soon.
Open Source GIS solutions gain more and more attention in the Geoinformation sciences community over the past years. Now there are numerous usable and stable Open Source libraries and tools for spatial data management, customization and visualisation available. Open Source in general has a very strong relation to topic of Interoperability and Open GI Standards (e.g., Standards specified by the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC)).
The OpenRoutingService.org initiative has worked on the OGC Specification “Open Location Services” (OpenLS) Before the implementation of OpenRoutingService.org several other services based on open standards have been realized. In near futures these implementations should be available at http://www.freeOpenLS.org.
Since April 8th of this year OpenRoutingService.org is accessible online. The services uses free geodata from OpenStreetMaps (OSM) and provides routing functionality based on the OGC LopenLS Route Service Specification. The plan is to provide routing based on OSM also for other software systems or as web service. Currently the service is enhanced in case of functionality, because until now it is limited to Germany. The area of Germany in OSM covers more than 600.000 streets, which must be transformed into topological graphs for the routing module. During this transformation more then 1.3 million features are generated.
They have tested the performance with different routing-libraries (geotools, pgrouting) and algorithms (Dijkstra, A*).
One further interesting feature of OpenRoutingService.org is the “Avoid Area” function. Here the user can enter an area (e.g, dangerous area), which is excluded in the routing process.
[via: Zur Kopplung von OpenSource, OpenLS und OpenStreetMaps in OpenRouteService.org (Neis, P., Zipf, A.)]
Written and submitted from Home, using my 802.11g WiFi network.
To visual geographic content most of the people I know use Google Maps. But must if always e Google Maps? in my opinion NO! Currently there are great alternatives out there, where you can do a lot more than with Google Maps. Interesting projects comming from the open source community. I think the main problem (at least in my country) is that people simple don’t know much about these possibilities, therefore I’d like to provide some links:
On the Example page of OpenLayers a lot of differnt maps are shown, where you can get an idea what is possible and how it works.
Written and submitted from Home, using my 802.11g WiFi network.
In the beginning of this year Geonames.org has released a new Service called Geotree. This service structure Country information and other spatial information in a tree view, which can be accessed together with a map. Currently (March 2008) version 1.2 is available, including features like CSV Export, different languages, capitals and random view.
All locations can be visualized using major web based base map services like Map24, Google Maps, Yahoo Maps, Microsoft, Openlayer, Openstreetmaps, etc.
The service can be seen under http://geotree.geonames.org/
License: Open Source GPLv3
Written and submitted from Home, using my 802.11g WiFi network.
I’m currently looking for some interesting open source or freeware GIS desktop software. To answer the question about an alternative for ArcGIS, Intergraph Geomedia or MapInfo I will introduce some alternative freeware GIS tools. The first application I found on the net is uDig.
What is uDig?
uDig is an GIS software program produced by a community led by Canadian-based company Refractions Research. It is based around the Eclipse platform and features full layered Open Source GIS. It is written in Java and released under GNU Lesser General Public License.
Project Outline
The goal of uDig is to provide a complete Java solution for desktop GIS data access, editing, and viewing. uDig aims to be:
- User friendly, providing a familiar graphical environment for GIS users;
- Desktop located, running as a thick client, natively on Windows, Mac OS/X and Linux;
- Internet oriented, consuming standard (WMS, WFS, WCS) and de facto (GeoRSS, KML, tiles) geospatial web services; and,
- GIS ready, providing the framework on which complex analytical capabilities can be built, and gradually subsuming those capabilities into the main application.
[http://udig.refractions.net]
Written and submitted from Home, using my 802.11g WiFi network.
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