No data plan? No bars of phone service? No keyboard? No problem!
Smart-phones have zoomed past several milestones in many areas that make them an ideal offline blogging platform. Consider:
- Phone cameras are as good as point-and-shoot dedicated devices
- Phones now have offline speech to text that transcribes much faster than typing, and with surprising accuracy
- Phone GPS devices enable recording and storing exactly where you are, all the time
- Phones have huge storage capacity to cache your blog entries until your device “sees” the Internet again
It is therefore no surprise to see smart-phone applications spring up such as TripJournal, MobilyTrip, BlogPress, Tumblr, Blogger, and WordPress.
Like TripJournal, MobilyTrip uses your GPS sensor to mash up locations, maps, and routes in Google Maps. It keeps a slick floating time line calendar widget in the web pages it publishes for you. And it integrates your own trip journals with polished, professional online “Guides” about the places you visit that they curate on their web site.
MobilyTrip is, of course, travel-specific. And it locks you into their web site to publish your trip journal. The company that publishes it is a French start-up; their port from iOS to Android is weak, unstable, and clunky.
It takes forever for their web pages to load in North America, and the inefficient JavaScript is slow to update outside of Safari. I tried to make the Android app work for me, but I could not out how to use the features. I plan to re-visit the application because it shows enormous promise. My friend who uses it on iOS wrote a fantastic trip journal that I enjoyed reading as he updated it.
Since this blog is on Google blogspot I decided to try their Android client in my phone. The App is very minimalistic but worked surprisingly well for my needs. In particular it can attach photos, add tags, and it uses the Google offline speech to text. The blogger app really wants to “see” Internet all the time but it does store your draft offline.
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