And I am curious about some of the cellphone batttery life mentioned here. I get about three days out of my blackberry, if I leave it on all the time. I never take it backpacking, but if I did, I would only turn it on once or twice a day, perhaps when I might imagine there would be some kind of reception. The battery would last way more than a week at that rate.
But I am interested in these new phones that offer a GPS function that receives the satellite signal separate from cell phone reception. No, that won't help you as a signaling device, but it should allow you to use your phone as a GPS...and if it has a good camera as well, I can imagine taking a phone for the camera and GPS function.
And yeah...this may be derailing the original conversation...but what the heck. I started the thread!
I can turn off everything on the phone but the gps app and the gps feature - put it on airplane mode, dim the screen down to barely visible, and use the app killer many times a day to kill the random junk the phone starts up again when I'm not using the phone (this is darned annoying at work - the phone sits on my desk on the charger, and starts some thing up at random) - and it's dead within a day. Cold weather makes it die faster.
It is a crappy phone, and I know it, but it's what I have to work with right now. Folks who have iPhones have much better battery life than I do.
The GPS app actually works pretty well, though it is a royal pain. Takes too long to manipulate the controls and scroll around the map. If I don't remember to download all the map sections I need, I get a track on a blank screen. It is inaccurate quite a bit but I have found that many GPS units of all kinds can be.
I shudder to think what would happen if I had to rely on this for anything critical.
I still take the GPS even though I am supposed to be reviewing the app, and a nice 1:24000 map to boot.
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