A good outdoor mobile phone? Suggestions please

[william#]

mmmm gps phone
sadly i upgraded b4 they were available but as mentioned already bet they are hungry on the power.
i sudgest making a gord or bowls of some kind then spend a a few days making cordiage and have hammock to hammock comuniction
lol
but i have got a gps (actually i have 2 the first i got off ebay and was ripped off again on ebay as the base map was usa)
i have played with gps quiet a bit the past few years but have found limited use for them great for on the sea as the signal is pretty good there .though the gps now are using waas egos has certainly made the signal aquireing quicker.
i have found them great for night treks the down side being that u need to use a program like memory map to plot an acurate set of wey points so as to be able to use the gps exclusivly (memory map is a bit pricey too,and with the limited memory on a gps you need your pc or lap top to hand to load new routes.
topo uk is a relief map of the uk that yu can load on to your gps - again limited memory means you can only load bits of the uk at a time so again you may need your lappy .
geocasche now this is where they really become a bit more fun - for those of you who dont know its a global game where people hide boxes and you can download the coordinates from the net and go find them in your local area (or indeed create your own for others ).
and i heard this is available for the new phone gps .
when you take in to acount the cost of a handset the software needed to really get the most out of the things battery llife and that often you can not get a good fix if one at all in tree cover or in built up areas or valleys you are still better off with a local map which is a fraction of the cost and no big drama if gets damaged or lost.
will i continue to use the gps well yes ive spent tons on the thing with software , wish i never started - hell yes
optomistic about phone gps
nope

 

[rik_uk3]

For a good basic phone with no frills but a really good battery life and reception, I use an old Nokia 3310. No GPS, but it gets signals my fancy Motorola or my lads Sony can't, and the battery just goes on forever. You can pick them up for pennies on eBay

 

[Rebel]

The Nokia 5500 does look pretty good. I did rather fancy having GPS/Sat Nav built in though and the 5500 doesn't seem to have that. Still it's worth considering.

With the N95 it's possible to download street maps of many countries around the world and store them on the phone for no extra charge via your computer and a broadband connection. So far I've downloaded England (which is about 90MB and downloads very slowly onto the phone via USB - the phone can store 2GB of data). This is just the basic street maps and doesn't get into topographic mapping.

GPS data can be accessed as well but you have to go through a few arcane menus to get to it. Fixing is a bit on the slow side but not too bad. I haven't tried it in anything other than fairly open space. (It is SWMBOs so I can't play with it too much )

Personally I think it's handy to have an all in one solution - music, radio, dictaphone, notepad, camera, video, sat nav, organizer, phone, etc - that fits in my pocket. I realize it doesn't do all its tricks quite as professionally as dedicated units but it does them okay and good enough for me in many situations.

 

[Aragorn]

not meaning to hijack the thread, but could your recommend a good first gps unit william#

 

[w00dsmoke]

Hi,



Moving onto my current phone - the nokia 5500, which is the latest outdoor phone by them.

I've had it since september and it's not let me down, it's been sailing with me (in a wproof bag), mountaineering up ben nevis in winter (when i forgot my wproof bag), countless wet bike rides and hikes, every day in my pocket and it still looks near perfect.

The 5500 is also technically a "smartphone" in that it runs symbian s60 3rd edition, meaning that you can put all sorts of software on it. I have put tomtom navigator on it and it works fine! There is some GPS sofware included with the phone also, for using as a waypoint marker etc (of course you need to get a bluetooth GPS device to connect to).

The battery is not the greatest due to the usage requirements of being a smartphone, but it is not unacceptable.

I'd reccomend it to anyone. - couple of deals i found here: http://student-mobile-deals.com/display.asp?search=5500&showdeals=75

This is the phone I've used since it came out. Only because I had my 5540 knicked and I needed a replacement. I use it canoeing without a waterproof bag... and it's always been fine although I've not submerged it as yet! Ok it does use an awful lot of power up but hey it lasts a long weekend camping so thats good enough for me. I prefer my old rubber armoured 5540 but this has some cool extras I like like cammera and radio too.

 

[Goliath]

How about getting an Otterbox for your phone?
http://www.otterbox.com/

Great stuff, altho your phone gets somewhat bulkier.

 

[TimB]

I work on mobiles all day and would definatly recommend the Nokia 5500 sport as a great outdoor phone. I usually switch to using this if I'm outside doing stuff.
I'dropped it over a balcony in the office onto a hard floor 15ft below and it's just bounced!!
It got a reasonable 2mp camera too.

 

[mrstorey]

I'd recommend the Orange Smartphone SPV C500 (or similar). You can run Memory Map Pocket Navigator on it so you can view proper OS digital maps on your phone. Very cool. And if you get an external GPS unit for it, it can do anything that the N95 can do.

 

[clcuckow]

I have got a Mio A701 GPS smart phone and just love the fact that I use TomTom to navigate to the place I want to walk then switch to memory map and use it as a rolling map. The only thing agin it is that the GPS eats the battery so I have add a Free Loader which is a really great bit of kit as an alternative power source.

They are both pretty solid but I still keep my 'phone' in a berghaus gps case.

 

[FGYT]

i use a pda phone the O2 exec which runs windows so is very versatile pdf exel word etc etc
run memory map for maps i have all uk in 1:25000 as well as 1:50000 on my main PC

this one does need a separate blue tooth GPS reciver

the new O2 orbit has one built in but ia a smaller screen

 

[anthonyyy]

I like to put my phone in a waterproof phone bag. You can so easily ruin a phone in the great outdoors.