I take back all the nasty things I said...

I take back all the nasty things I said about the camera on my Android phone - well, almost all of them.  Over the last couple of months - since my Paris weekend in May and the Smartphone v. Android faceoff - I've been using my camera phone more and more often.  And the results aren't all that bad.

Here's a dozen pictures, ranging from the outdoors to close-ups to twilight.  The phone did OK, though still not as well (in most cases) as a "real" camera.  Still, my learning curve continues:

Mapping Pintxos in San Sebastian

San Sebastian being in Basque country, there are two names for everything.  San Sebastian, for example, also goes by Donostia, and what I would normally call tapas are correctly referred to as pintxos. In our one day in San Sebastian/Donostia, Jeff and I managed to squeeze in not one, but two pintxos crawls.

Blue footed Booby
(photo by Scott Ableman)

This was the perfect excuse to break out Jeff's newly revamped Android app, SpotPad. SpotPad allows you to take notes tagged to your location, so you can later remember where that really cool store was, or where you finally spotted that rare blue-footed booby.  

Objectively speaking, SpotPad is awesome.

At every bar we stopped by, we grabbed a couple pintxos while I wrote an insta-review as a new SpotPad note.  When we got home, I sent myself an email with all my notes attached as an KML file (this is a one-step process within SpotPad).  I uploaded that KML file to a new Google map, and ta-daaa, my very own Donostia pintxos crawl map (see below).

I think we've already established that I am not technologically adept, particularly when it comes to smartphones, but this was pretty easy (I added the pictures later, when editing it on my computer).  I feel like I have a new toy - I'm going to start embedding Google maps in all my posts.  Consider yourself warned.

View Pintxos in Donostia (San Sebastian) in a larger map


ps - As this is a trial run for me, you might have to click through to the whole map in order to see the photos and descriptions.

Smartphone Face Off: Camera Edition

When we first arrived in Paris last month, my friend and I realized that neither of us had brought a camera, assuming that the other one would. This left us reliant entirely on the cameras in our smartphones - one a Motorola Android, the other an iPhone.

I was interested to see, when we compared pictures afterwards, that we had often taken pictures of the same thing - and that I could easily tell which phone took which version.

Here is just a sampling of our dueling pictures. After the jump, which phone is which (and some further musings on the Great War of Smartphones).

Smartphone A	Smartphone B