N82: GPS and Battery consumption

When I received my N95 last time,I was totally disappointed about the unavailability of Nokia map services in our country,which left the role of GPS totally untouched.But after seeing the Stavros work and Mark Guim’s posts only, I figured out that instead of Nokia maps I can use sports tracker(I know very well that they two differ so much both in functionality and usage but,for my purpose it was the only option,when there’s nothing available I must go on with what I have) As I’ve been very busy in the last week actually I really didn’t have much time to stay at home and explore the device.so as I had to go on some long trips,thought of mapping them using sports tracker,especially a GPS is very useful when it comes to hiking and camping in remote areas,where it can serve as a perfect guide to find the way.In order to consider it as a reliable source of way finding it must have a long battery life.This is where most GPS equipped phone become useless,since in a mobile phone the battery has to power so many other components like gsm signal receiver,high resolution display,bluetooth,wi-fi and others.so if you are in a long track battery drainage is a main problem you’ll probably come across. Here I’ve mapped my route between two major cities in Sri Lanka:Colombo to Kandy while I was traveling in a van and the last part Kandy to my place by a Bus.So during this mapping I didn’t use the camera to get geotagged pictures or anything else on the phone,cos I was bit afraid of running out of battery before I complete the tour.As I’ve used the same route to both go and return I started mapping only while I’m coming back,as I didn’t want two overlapping lines on each other.In this test I kept running the GPS continuously for 5h 4min 59s,but even after that there was 2 bars of battery indicator was left,So for a mobile phone GPS N82 is well performing.Also the GPS signal receival was at an average of around 9/16 throughout the whole trip and the phone heating was also not very high.So it does perform well enough as a good GPS packed in a nice piece of cake.

Here I’ve post a link to the Nokia sports tracker beta site and also to the Google maps,but when I import the kml file into the Google maps it doesn’t show the whole rout in one piece as you can see,instead it has split it apart into 11pages.so here I have linked only the 1st page.

Sports Tracker Beta Site

Google Map
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