Trialling Tech

January 29, 2010 by Darren
Filed under: mobiles in the outdoors 

The last couple of mornings when walking the pack has seen me use the time to record some audio on the iPhone for my tech blog. There is a point to doing this now. Like all things the worse time to try out something new is when you need to use it in anger on the trail. So looking like a tit walking round talking into my iPhone I recorded my thoughts on the iPad and another tech issue Apple vs The Google Voice App.

I’m rather impressed with the audio quality considering it is just the internal phone mic, which is also being held away from the mouth, and not being held next to mouth like a phone usually is. The plus side is that I can also if I chose and had the money get an external mic to use with the program that would allow me to record in stereo.

Oh the app I was using was the FiRe app. It’s only draw back is that it doesn’t offer the option to save as an mp3. But I can understand why, that would require them having to license the tech involved and pushing up the cost of the app. Otherwise it does have a few output options on the sound formats.

So I think I have video, audio and photos sorted on the iPhone. I’m also at the moment playing around with some other apps that I will talk about more in another post. But these are more to do with using the GPS side of the iPhone.

I suppose the big question for all of you out there is why do I care about all this? I don’t have an iPhone, so what?

Over the last few years the mobile has become more and more of a convergent device. It truly has become a useful tool for those of us in the outdoors. You may not have an iPhone but you can bet good money on the fact that the iPhone is having a massive influence on the phones that you can get from other manufacturers. Whether you think that is a good thing or not is another thing altogether.

The iPhone really was a game changer for the industry. A very positive influence. Yes all the bits where there before hand, but it took some-one like Apple to come along and put them together in a way that worked and was consumer friendly.

So yes I talk about editing photos, or recording video and podcasts on the iPhone, that is the phone I have. There are other phones out there that can also do this, like Google Android based phones or the Palm Pre to single out a couple of specific examples.

But I think it would be remiss of me not to cover developments or useful apps that I come across in this field, and relate them to use in the outdoors. Now if you argued I’ve been doing a crap job of it, then I couldn’t argue against that.

Besides if you see what I am able to do on the iPhone it may get you thinking about what you can achieve with whatever phone you are using.

Wow I never saw that coming when I started writing this post. That’s what I love about writing my posts. I start in once place and end up in another place altogether. This was going to be a short post, with a photo taken a couple of days ago and some taken from this morning.

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I’ll finish todays post with a photo of ol’ three legs himself paddling this morning. He may be short of a leg, but he is still hard as nails. The majority of the pond is till frozen, and I can assure you that water is ice cold.

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