Tagzania Blog

Last Friday we attended the Basque Android developers (and hackers) meeting, Etxekoandroid.

Etxekoandroid has been promoted by Juanan Pereira with the goal of creating a developer community around Android. The first meeting was held at the Korta building of the University of the Basque Country, in Donostia-San Sebastian.

We talked about the new firmwares and new works like Jesusfreke , TheDude’s , Haykuro and so. There were ideas about new apps and also some questions regarding to the future of Android.

We have created Tagzania Mobile, with the aim of working more and more on Android (and also other mobile platforms). Our first step is Tagzania’s Android app, which you can see a demo in the video below:

We’ll launch it soon and we’d like to attend the upcoming Android Developer Challenge.

Our users will be able to add new places and search for them in Tagzania.com wherever they are with this new app. Currently, we are working to integrate the GPS tracker so that we can send them to Tagzania.com.

We’ll keep on working on it.

As soon as we heard My Tracks’ launch last week we decided we had to test it with our HTC G1 Android phone. So I took my bike and went for a ride. I’ve got a Garmin GPS so I’m an intermediate user of this kind of devices.

My Tracks is really simple to use, you just press a button and it starts recording a new track. When you finish, you can send it to your account in Google Maps and Google Docs. You can also share the KML or GPX or send it to an email. With my Garmin GPS device is not as easy as with the G1. My Tracks shows the typical info for a track like average speed or distance and a really cool altimeter graphic.

Here you have an image of my Saturday bike-ride:

But everything is not so wonderful. By the time I got home, two hours and a half later, the G1 was close to run out of battery, which is a really bad news for a phone. I’ve mentioned you can see some cool info about your track and a nice altimeter graphic, but all these get lost when you send your information to Google. The track info is in Google Docs and the track itself in Google Maps, but the altimeter graphic is not available. It would be nice having all the info the same place.

Another cool option could be having the chance of sending the track from the phone to Tagzania

Motorola announced last week that their next cell phones will be running Android, Google´s operating system. At the moment, Motorola´s mobile phones were using Symbian. This announcement is not the only one pointing that Android has a brilliant future. Other companies like Sony Ericsson, Toshiba or Garmin will start soon using Android.

In Tagzania we also believe in Android, that´s why we have a new gadget in our brand new office: Google´s G1 Android phone for developers. We didn´t need too much time for deciding to buy this amazing phone. We bought it because of this special offer for developers.

Now it´s time to start working with Android and see how we can develop a useful application.