Elliott C. Back: Internet & Technology

You’ve probably been hearing a lot about TomTom’s new iPhone application, now available in iTunes for just $99. It’s the first true GPS navigation software available, a massive 1.1GB download that boasts stored maps of the entire US & Canada. No reception? No 3G or Edge? With TomTom, there’s no problem, as long as you have clear line-of-sight to the GPS eyes in the sky. Is it as good as their YouTube advertisement? I’ve bought it, driven 500 miles with it, and lived to tell the tale:

The simplest feature is navigation. You can find a place to go by entering an address, choosing a contact from your iPhone, browsing the map and picking start/end points, or searching through nearby points of interest. Once you’ve figured where to go, the TomTom app knows where you are and gives you a route:

Along the way you have a few route options:

The most useful of these is the list of instructions, which is a turn-by-turn summary of your drive:

The “points of interest” search tool is also quite nice. Here’s a list of restaurants near where I was at the time:

The application itself launches and calculates quickly, generally has OK GPS reception, and is lightweight enough to keep the heat on the iPhone 3GS to a minimum while allowing you to place music in the background without skipping. For $99 though, I’m not sure it’s entirely worth it. For example, the TomTom ONE-S 3.5″ is also $99, and it’s the full unit, not just the software. And, there are some missing features / problems:

• The TomTom application kills the battery, you’ll need a car adapter. I was running low after just 2-3 hours.
• GPS reception is best when the iPhone is held upright, near the dash. Holding it down in your lap or a cup tray doesn’t work well, so you’ll need a dashboard mount.
• In Manhattan, many times the application cannot find a GPS signal for some time. Driving through overpasses/underpasses confuses the GPS, causing it to sometimes issue false directions.
• While the turning directions are spoken, the street names are not. This is a software feature–why not include it?

If TomTom can improve the signal quality and add spoken street names to the application, I would value it around $60. However at $99, it’s a tad expensive, and only useful if you refuse to purchase a full GPS unit–say, because mostly you rent cars.

Update:

After being out for a couple months, a new update has come out that promises more accurate GPS fixes, and the reviews on iTunes have placed the TomTom Navigator application at 2.5/5 stars:

The primary complaints are:

• Slow time to acquire GPS, bad GPS accuracy
• No spoken street names (this bugs me too)
• The high price, lack of updates, huge file size
• Applications crashes

The New York Times had a fantastic article today Drivers and Legislators Dismiss Cellphone Risks about the risks of driving while using a cellphone to make calls or send txt messages. Not to be under-emphasized is the incremental distraction risk other gadgets, such as GPS navigation, mp3 players, XM radio, and iPod docks, offer. Let’s take a brief look at some of the scientific research going into the problem:

The U.S. Department of Transportation, National Highway Traffic Safety Administration released a series of papers, one of which, Association Between Cellular-Telephone Calls and Motor Vehicle Collisions notes:

The risk of a collision when using a cellular telephone was four times higher than the risk when a cellular telephone was not being used. The relative risk was similar for drivers who differed in personal characteristics such as age and driving experience; calls close to the time of the collision were particularly hazardous; and units that allowed the hands to be free offered no safety advantage over hand-held units.

Another paper from the DoT, The Impact of Internal Distraction on Driver Visual Behavior highlights the hypothesis (yet to be tested in that forum) that increased complexity in processing non-visual stimuli leads to a direct reduction of visual processing ability:

It is known from past research (e.g., Miura, 1990) that patterns of visual search may be influenced by environmental complexity, such as that available in the road scene. There is also evidence that visual search behavior may be influenced, not only by the external environment, but also by factors internal to the person, such as the cognitive complexity of an ongoing task. Recently, Recarte & Nunes (2000) measured eye fixations while driving. They reported that drivers’ visual functional-field size was reduced (vertically and horizontally) when drivers performed a demanding cognitive task while driving.

According to the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis, “the use of cell phones by drivers may result in approximately 2,600 deaths, 330,000 moderate to critical injuries, 240,000 minor injuries, and 1.5 million instances of property damage in America per year.” A particularly telling quote comes from University of Utah psychology professor David Strayer: “If you put a 20-year-old driver behind the wheel with a cell phone, their reaction times are the same as a 70-year-old driver who is not using a cell phone. It’s like instantly aging a large number of drivers.”

The problem seems to be quite simple: competing stimuluses rob our brains of the processing power to focus attention on driving, primarily a visual-motor task. The solution, I believe, comes from video games and the air force: HUD displays. If we can collapse all of the tasks we want to perform into a single visual field, motorists will be able to keep their focus on driving. There are lots of ways for technology to assist driving, if voice recognition can be used to direct navigation, with a display directly on the dash, if communications were built into the vehicle, and with additional range-sensing equipment to recognize and highlight obstacles and dangers.

BMW has already begun building heads-up-displays (HUD) into their cars:

Next-generation HUDs will wraparound the entire windshield and contain more, higher-density information. Cars should have the ability to highlight aspects of their surroundings and obstacles to the driver, or take corrective action in their own right. With a HUD to handle coherent output, and good voice-recognition to handle input, drivers will no longer be distracted by outside stimuluses when driving.

After report surfaced that Apple’s new iPhone 3GS had problems with overheating, followup articles point to the batteries being the source of the problems:

Vronko said the iPhone 3GS’s heat problem is evidently tied to the battery, because the pictures of discolored white iPhones reveal the outline of the battery. He noted that although thousands of iPhone 3GS users probably own defective handsets, the risk of causing fire or explosion is low because the iPhone’s battery cell is extremely small.

I decided to do a small test and played two rounds of Star Defense on the phone while on Battery power. Here’s what I found using an infrared thermometer. Initially, ambient temperature of the room was 80°F and the iPhone measured 83°F on the back. After playing the game, the room temperature had dropped 2° to 78°F while the iPhone 3GS measured 102°F on the back. More interestingly, there was a temperature gradient:

I’ve also felt the phone get much hotter than this quick test, probably proportional to how much load you put on its battery. There’s an Apple support document called Keeping iPhone 3G and iPhone 3GS within acceptable operating temperatures which documents some obvious “leaving your phone in the sun” cases which can cause overheating:

- Leaving the device in a car on a hot day.
- Leaving it in direct sunlight for extended amounts of time.
- Using certain applications in hot conditions or direct sunlight for long periods of time, such as GPS tracking in a car on a sunny day or listening to music while in direct sunlight.