Pong

September 29th 2014, Vacation Summary

September 2014 Sardinia Vacation | | September 29th 2014 Hiking Phone

Summary of experiences with the Ping app during the Sardinia Vacation:

The app itself worked rock solid: the core transmission queue with sqlite and ssl proved to be stable, except a minor bug when flushing the transmission queue after the activity was deactivated using the Android home button. This bug has been fixed meanwhile.

There were a few other hickups related to Qt 5.3 though:

  • QML cam module crashes sometimes on exit.
  • Video is buggy: First video works, second one locks up the camera. Sometimes even the first one.
  • App hung a few times when changing the orientation or on wake up - another sleep&wake cycle helped most of the time.

And there were problems caused by the GPS hardware of my LG L7II mobile. While I just like the stamina and the small size of my LG with a decent price tag, the GPS module is just ok. With good conditions it does its job, but if conditions are sub-optimal as is often the case during hiking it can get annoying for the following reasons:

  • Compared to my Garmin navi, GPS startup is very slow.
  • Even sparse trees prevent a fast startup and reduce accuracy significantly.
  • GPS sometimes cannot find a fix for more than 15 minutes, when conditions were not optimal but still ok.
  • GPS at one occasion even hung in a bad fix showing −3000 meter altitude, which a reset eventually fixed.

Conclusion: The app works reliable but the GPS module of my LG L7II is ok but sub-optimal for hiking purposes → I need to get myself a better Android smartphone with a more reliable gps, see next page…

September 2014 Sardinia Vacation | | September 29th 2014 Hiking Phone

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