Mobile machinations in iPhone town

Tom Tom's iPhone app and cradle.

Before Apple's will-it-or-won't-it release of a tablet in a couple of weeks, rumours of OS 4 for iPhone in April and other speculations wild and fanciful, what's going on for iPhones in New Zealand?

Before you hit the road for another holiday (as I'm about to do), you might want to harness your car's interior to some iPhone goodness. For one thing, you're not allowed to call or text while you're driving. I kid you not, two months ago I was doing 100kph on the Auckland motorway at 11pm when I was overtaken by a lone guy who was clearly texting as he drove. So I'm quite relieved about the new law.

When travelling, your iPhone knows where you are, and your car can keep it charged. A decent bracket and you can see your location on the free Maps app on every iPhone. Better still, your passenger can direct you.

Go one better, albeit for many dollars more, and you can use a purpose-built navigation app like TomTom in conjunction with an iPhone mount. This virtual passenger tells you (in a voice you can choose, and in many languages) where to turn, when to do so, and even advising which lane to stay on on the motorway, which is good in Auckland, I can tell you. I'd be curious to see how it handles the one-way Wellington maze, if anyone's tried that?

TomTom's car kit ($200) is now available. I've seen cheaper mounting kits, but this is unmistakably well made. There's even a free app for the car kit alone. It gives you no navigation, but Car Kit Tool tells you whether or not your iPhone is docked, your GPS location and model/serial etc for the car kit itself, which I guess is handy if you have problems or queries.

So if you want a well made mount but you don't spring for the TomTom app, it could still be useful.

The mount holds an iPhone very securely, but it's easy to get it in and out of the bracket. It charges the iPhone with the supplied mini-USB to car AC outlet cable. If you have a car stereo with a stereo minipin input, you can run a cable into it from the iPhone and play your music collection over the car speakers.

But if you do have the $119.99 TomTom navigation app for New Zealand (which was discounted to $99.99 for the Christmas period), you'll be a happy camper cos hey, you'll actually find that mystical camp ground.

TomTom seems wildly expensive for an iPhone app, considering you normally pay nothing, or maybe a measly $1.29 for an app, and virtually never more than $8-$12, but you're buying TomTom's reliability and expertise in this space.

A standalone TomTom device for your car, by the way, lists in New Zealand from $300-$600, depending on the unit; we're talking $320 for the TomTom app and the car kit. Note that you can also use the TomTom app without the kit, of course.

The weird thing about the kit (or am I just out of touch with sticky-tech?) is that it has a disc of opaque rubber on it. This actually doesn't seem sticky, but the pictogram instructions clearly showed placing it against a part of the inside of your windshield that does not impede the driver's view, then rotating the solid plastic black disk behind it to make it stick fast.

Likely, I thought, but it sure does stick, and that's even before you rotate the disk, which really seems to glue the thing on.

That said, rotate the disk the other way, and it's pretty easy to prize off by its two stick-out tabs. I don't know what this opaque stuff is, but it's pretty impressive.

I like TomTom once travelling – vary from the route and it just recalculates to get you back on track. I like the 3D mode which shows the side roads coming up, and I found the voiced instructions clear and almost invariably delivered by the right time.

The only thing I think could be improved is inputting addresses that aren't already in your contacts. It finds the area you want to go to, then delivers a sometimes very long list of the streets there. You have to scroll down, find the street, press on it and input a street number. I'd rather just type in the address in one go and it would find that. But hey, if you don't want to end up in Whykickamoocow, it's worth it.

Powerstick

Another really cool device that's come to my attention is the Powerstick. This is impressive for many reasons:

1/ It's not expensive, at $80. It doesn't just work for iPhones and iPods but all sorts of other phones – it comes with nine adapters.

2/ It's not made in China. Not that there's anything wrong with things being made in China, it's just that it's so rare these days. These groovy lifesaver things are actually designed and made in Canada, by Ecosol.

3/ and best: It's really handy and works as advertised. It's a little bigger than a USB flash-drive. Pull the cap off to expose the USB plug, put it into a USB port, give it 90 minutes to charge, unplug it and bung it in your pocket, backpack or glovebox. It holds the charge for six months! Plug in the relevant adapter and your mobile device, press the power button, and you have an instant charger complete with LCD readout.

The first time I plugged my iPhone in it said something about the device not being recognised but never again after that; it pepped the charge 10% in 6 minutes. How handy is that? Read more about these great things here. You can order them off the site or buy them from Noel Leeming. Well worth it.

Party of five?

Vodafone MiFi 2352 'mobile hotspot' designed to let you share mobile broadband easily, the MiFi is a small, curvy device about as big as a cigarette case.

With the MiFi you can set up your own mobile broadband wireless hotspot anywhere in Vodafone coverage. Portable and battery powered, with easy one-touch setup, you can share your broadband with up to five people quickly and easily, with no wires. Suits the camper van road trip to beat 'em all, or for that impromptu conference in a Napier café.

With Macs you can easily create one-to-one wireless networks two Macs or between a Mac and an iPhone to save cellular data costs. But you can't do this between one and more than one other device without an AirPort Extreme, AirPort Express, Time Capsule or using the wireless facility of a broadband router.

When you first unpack it, you put in the SIM, add the battery and charge it for an initial four hours. On the unit itself, the power button changes colour to show connection and battery status. There's a MicroSDHC slot for extra memory, the MicroUSB port for charging and an LED showing the status of WLAN connections.

The power LED flashes amber when it's charging, and becomes solid amber once fully charged.
Power the device on and the MiFi connects immediately to the Vodafone's network. If you don't connect anything to it, it goes into standby mode, then powers back up once you plug something in.

It worked exactly as advertised in the WLAN mode. AirPort in a 2008 MacBook Pro picked up 'VodafoneMobileHotspot' in the WiFi list at top right of my MacBook's monitor, along with my usual networks. Putting in the password )it's on the back of the battery compartment: you can change it) had me connected. I did the same thing on my iPhone and maintained the connection up to about 10 metres away, with a wall in between, easily sharing the connection with the MacBook Pro.

Install the latest drivers for it, if you have Snow Leopard. I found version 3.0.4.10 'with support for OS X Snow Leopard' here.

It costs $499 (device only); or $299 with a $69.95 monthly plan. Conact Vodafone NZ

Arty Auckland iPhone wizardry

Finally, want to indulge in some arty Auckland iPhone wizardry? I do.

Join the 'phone GPS data harvest' on Monday 18th January at 10am (NZ time; 1:00 GMT).
iPhone users need to down load the free app Comob Net before 10am on Monday 18th. You start the app, select a name, then join the group iform by entering 'iform' into the Group Name box in the settings.

By selecting ALL, participants can see their links to other members of the group. NB Data Roaming must be on for this app to work – the full
instructions are on the Comob.

The app was developed by the Edinburgh College of Art, with the support of Edinburgh University for collaborative mapping with GPS technology to explore social and spatial relationships between people in motion.

Researchers at AUT are working in conjunction with Comob researchers to generate 3D visualisations of the spatial relations between users.

The 3D forms generated will be printed on a rapidprototyper for the exhibition Hybrids at the Moving Image Centre on the 29th January until 6th March 2010, so you can see what you assisted for yourself, in 3D and without wearing funny glasses.

(Thanks to Auckland multimedia artist and AUT lecturer James Charlton for this information.)

- Mark Webster mac-nz.com