Palm opearting system showing a NOAA marine weather forecast and a radar weather animation. BROWSING AND BLOGGING
Phones are also good for light web browsing. As we mentioned before there will be some sites that will not display properly, but the majority work just fine. And as smartphones become more popular, more websites will consider smartphone access when they design their services. We have used our smartphones to research potential marinas and anchorages, to look up information about possible destinations, and to seek advice solving problems.
We still have a shelf of cruising guides, but we find that we go to them less often. How many times have you chosen a destination based on a glowing description of a restaurant, gallery or event only to find it had changed hands, closed or was no longer being held? It no longer makes sense to depend on a printed source of information that is dated the moment you buy it. When we are looking for destinations, we start by going online and looking at the local town's website. They often have an overview of the area, links to local businesses and an event calendar.
Last year while we were cruising through the Chesapeake Bay, we looked up Chestertown, Md., a place we wanted to see. Its web site was full of information about their annual Chestertown Wildlife Show happening a couple weeks hence. We adjusted our plans to make the show and enjoyed a wonderful weekend visiting the many carving displays and events.
Email on a Palm Centro.A few years ago, we began running a blog while underway so that our friends and family could "participate" in our cruising adventures. It has been a great way to stay in touch, share our experiences as we go along and just feel more connected to those we miss. An added bonus was getting to know many other cruisers and would-be cruisers who found and followed our blog. It turned out that we didn't know the vast majority of people visiting our blog, at least not then. They were a great source of information, support and even friendship. (For a story on our blog, see link.)
Having a smartphone with a built-in camera made our blog easier and more relevant. We could capture daily events as they occurred and quickly add them to our blog, including photos and videos. It was fun to see comments from others as we went along and added to our sense of safety when we went on multi-day passages offshore. We were pretty certain someone would notice if we missed more than one day on the blog!
CHARTS AND NAVIGATION
Incredible advances in navigation have also been occurring in smartphones. More and more manufacturers are building in GPS hardware, giving you a very small and mobile navigation device along with your phone. If your smartphone does not have a built in GPS, there are solutions in the $50 range to add one.
We use our phone's navigation capabilities in several ways. First, it is a backup to our onboard navigation system. Having spent our careers in the computer field, we know that all technology will eventually fail. And following Murphy's Law, it will fail at the most inopportune time possible. So we keep our navigation software running on our smartphone, displaying actual NOAA charts and following us while under way. Often we will have the smartphone displaying a zoomed out version giving us an overview of where we are heading, while the onboard system is showing more detail. (See video.) We also have our paper charts out at the helm and update our location with a post-it arrow every 15 minutes or so. You might call us paranoid but we don't mind.
