ExplorOz Podcast: Australian Overland Adventures and Mapping
Welcome to the ExplorOz Podcast: Australian Overland Adventures and Mapping. Michelle and David, the founders of ExplorOz and the developers of Australia's best offline mapset available in the ExplorOz Traveller app will take you on adventures and beyond. Tune in to hear how offline maps are made, and go on a virtual journey with the mapping survey team to hear how they find exciting new places and how they balance work, and holidays. You'll get expert advice, and insider tips on what's involved in long term travel including all the tech stuff, and featured locations that are being added and verified in the app content. You'll hear about the ExplorOz Team's adventures 4WDing, camping, hiking, and more across Australia, from Aussie national parks to the beaches West to East, the rainforests, gorges and islands. Fuel your passion for overlanding whether you're a camper, caravanner or motorhomer, and ignite plans for your next trip or tune in whilst you're on the road. Subscribe and never miss a new episode.
ExplorOz Podcast: Australian Overland Adventures and Mapping
How to Choose the Right Device and App for Your Travel Adventure
How do you choose the right device for your travels and explorations? Today we are going to clear up the confusion as we guide you through the labyrinth of device options including phones, tablets, and car play head units. We'll be shining a light on the key features such as offline capabilities, GPS functionalities, and even a unique members-only feature, all of which will level up your experience with the ExplorOz Traveler app and offline EOTopo Maps. We'll also throw in some handy tips on keeping your device charged while on the go.
Join us in this episode as we go micro, analysing the nuances of how location data, map resolution, and processing power can be affected by your device type. We'll also expose the sneaky marketing tactics that budget devices use and show you how to read between the lines. You'll get the lowdown on GPS functionality in Apple devices, the pros and cons of using an iPad for navigation, GPS technology, screen resolution, Windows support and device charging depreciation all covered in this episode.
Finally, we'll uncover the potential of AI Boxes for Android Apps on CarPlay, giving you a taste of how you can access Android apps on your CarPlay head unit.
The episode will wrap up with our takes on device testing, availability, and why a powerful device can make all the difference for an awesome app experience. So, tune in and transform your digital travel journey with us.
So welcome everyone to another episode of the Explorers podcast. Today we're going to cover some of the frequently asked questions that we get asked about what device is best to purchase and use for running the Explorers Traveler app and the offline Eotopo Maps. So we've got quite a lot to cover today and we're going to start with the basics and we're going to look at, you know, device options what's out there phones, tablets and the like. We're also going to explain some of the basics for those of you that aren't familiar with how to go about using an app store and the basics of how the app store works in regards to paid apps and how the updates work. We're also going to discuss how do you keep a device charged when you're travelling, because these are some of the questions that people often come to us and usually they're just quite some simple technical basics, so we will speak these through to you today. For those that aren't quite sure what to do, there's some practical tips that you'll pick up. We're also going to discuss some of the offline capability issues and GPS, because some people have asked questions and it makes me realise that just this stuff just doesn't come naturally to everybody if you haven't experienced it before. So these are the topics. We'll also look at screen sizes and how that might affect your device choice when it comes to buying, and we will eventually start talking about some new technology that's available With the head units and those, in particular, that are car play only head units. We're going to talk about the AI box adaptors and how you can actually use these to install the Explorers Traveller on a car play head unit. So make sure you listen all the way through to the end of this, because that'll be coming up towards the end. Also, towards the end, we're going to be talking about the membership only feature that we have available, which enables you to run the web app. So listen in. There's quite a bit to do and we'll get started.
Speaker 1:So, as I promised, the first thing we're going to start looking at is your various device options. So the Explorers Traveller app was built way back in 2016, that's seven years ago now but to be compatible across the three major platforms. So that means all devices, whether they're Windows, obviously on the latest Windows 10 and 11, not pre Windows 10. Also your Android devices, both phones and tablets, and also compatible on Apple devices, being the iOS platform. So that's your phones and iPads. When it comes to Apple Mac desktop computers, obviously they don't have built-in GPS and they're not practical to take with you in the car, but there are obviously MacBook users out there, so we'll touch on some of those capabilities.
Speaker 1:There's a few little things to think about when we talk about that. First and foremost, whilst I've said that the app platforms are all covered, the first way to get our app is you need to go to the app store, so you need to actually have the device and you'll be using the app icon to go to the app store. That's already built into your device and that's where you go and download the app. So let's just rewind a bit and go back to actually your device selection, because the first question that props up is what device is best? Do we actually recommend one platform over the other? Do we recommend Apple? Do we recommend Android? What about Windows? So look together, david and I might tackle this subject, because technology is changing all the time. What we say today may not apply if you're listening to this podcast in six months time.
Speaker 2:Tomorrow it might be our data tomorrow.
Speaker 1:So let's just confirm that today is November 2023 and at this time, the latest model Samsung tablets that are out is the. I checked it today. The S9 is the latest model of the Android tablets and, like all, what have we got in the background?
Speaker 2:The crows don't like the Android tablet. They're giving it a serve, anyway, continuing on.
Speaker 1:I do know from past podcasts you're actually going to hear those crows. We're quite conscious about background sounds and look, while we're talking about that, our background for today we are sitting on what's called Whitford's Nodes, which is not far from where we are in the south of Hillary's, and we're overlooking the Indian Ocean just there at Whitford's Beach.
Speaker 2:And it's one of those stinking hot days. We had 40 something yesterday, it's 36 or 37 today and, dedicated as we are, we're out here doing a podcast.
Speaker 1:We've got a slight breeze, which is kind of nice, so anyway back to devices and crows. Android tablets yeah.
Speaker 2:So Android tablets, yes, go on.
Speaker 1:So look like anybody. I'm sure the first thing you do is you jump onto the internet and go I want to buy an Android tablet, let's have a look what's out there. Or you've taken yourself off to JB Hi-Fi or you've gone to Officeworks If you were buying new. Those are the two stores that we would recommend that you go and have a look at One. You can hold them and have a look and try to do some comparisons, and one of the first things you'll see is there are a lot of different price points for what looks like the same model, and so I just had a quick look today on the internet and had a look. I went straight to the Samsung website and I do recommend going to the manufacturer's website first to get a good rundown on each of the different models. So the different price points in your different models is for a very good reason. So start by looking at what do you get with the premium, high-end model and then work your way backwards and you need to make a decision of what's right for you.
Speaker 2:Before we go on too far with that, there's one thing to note. We all have these latest phones and all of that sort of stuff, and the phone technology is moving very fast, but the tablets the tablets don't move as fast. The technology is a little bit slower in adopting the latest and greatest specs and CPU performances and everything else, because, at the end of the day, a lot of tablets have been created for much more social media watching Netflix and YouTube and things like that on a larger screen platform. So you've got to be a bit conscious that a device that might be really good wow, hello.
Speaker 1:Grace, he's just there on the screen, so whilst the it's, a Raven, that one actually. What is it?
Speaker 2:The difference between a Raven and a Crow?
Speaker 1:No someone might be interested anyway. The Raven with his little fluffy neck. That's what we have here in person.
Speaker 2:Now I forgot what I was talking about. So the technology within the tablet platforms. Now you know, as Michelle said, she did a search today for Android tablet. The first screen came up with an S9 Ultra for $1,200 or $2,000 or something, and then the next line item was a Lenovo. They're both 10 inch sort of screen sizes. They both read nicely that the Lenovo was $130, I think you said you know so how do you compare it to the $1,000 product?
Speaker 1:To be honest, with you.
Speaker 2:Between those two devices there could not possibly be a comparison. All you can be because of the price point. The price point is going to be dictated on your CPU. So the CPU internally, the graphics processing capability internally, the amount of ROM it has, the amount of RAM it has and the screen size. So you know the $2,000 device. Yeah, it'll certainly run the app reasonably you know exceptionally well the $130 device.
Speaker 2:I personally I wouldn't even look at it. It's going to be CPU limited. It might work today and then it doesn't get Android updates, you know. Or it does get some Android updates and then these things start to get slower. So the laptop, the tablet market, the tablet market is complicated and recently what I've been basically telling people that have been asking me, you know, what Android tablet should I buy, is I say look at the comparable model from Apple. So if you want like a, you say, grab the iPad at 10 inches and get the latest spec of one of those and that's going to cost you, you know, in the vicinity of five, six, seven, eight hundred dollars. They're the price point comparisons. These machines are all made in such similar specifications between these manufacturers, so their price performance, price points have become very much aligned. So certainly in the Samsung and the Apple market, you know, if you're looking at an eight hundred dollar iPad, you should be looking at an eight hundred dollar or more Android tablet.
Speaker 2:So just that's just the first key point. So take out the decision point about the two, those two particular platforms, and just look at it at dollar value and that's where you're going to go. So are you an Apple person or an Android person? And that's entirely up to you. And the app works equally well on both and also Windows, not as well on Windows. We'll discuss that in a bit more detail coming up.
Speaker 1:Now look, I know that going back about two years ago, there was a lot of discussion about people pushing us to try and quote a recommended specification. And look, technology changes far too fast and there's far too many model makes and models on the market to actually make that comparable number. We can't tell you all. You need a device with four gigabytes of RAM or eight gigabytes of RAM, whatever, because it's not apples for apples. So we always notice we do not give that statement and it's because it's an impossible statement that's comparable across devices, so it's not relevant.
Speaker 1:The whole point, however, is that when you do start comparing these devices, you will see there's a budget range the cheaper ones buying brand new there will be a lower end one and there will be everything in between and a higher end range. You will get what you pay for. So one of the things to keep in mind is the how to read between the lines of the marketing. So at the bottom in the budget, devices that obviously we'd all like to get away with, not spending too much, because we all do understand that a lot of these devices become almost superseded within five years.
Speaker 1:But you need to first of all put that in your head, that five years is the maximum, yeah. Okay, three to five is your maximum lifespan of the technology, of what you buy today, and I know that's going to come as a shock to the hip pocket. All right, particularly when you're presented with a $2,000 device and that's beyond your means.
Speaker 2:But understand that the more you spend, the longer you're going to get.
Speaker 1:Okay, so this is what we need to talk about. So let's start with the bottom, because I know that there's a lot of budget conscious people out there. So this is the first thing. Do you even consider the bottom of the line, and I'm talking buying you? Let's just not go down the path of refurbed online, because we do not recommend that at all for anybody who wants for running a high powered app that you're going to rely on for your special trip and in your remote and your offline. Just don't look at that option at the moment. So buying you.
Speaker 1:A budget device is marketed as great for the whole family streaming movies Okay, let's read between the lines. An entertainment device is not a high powered device. These streaming services actually don't use anywhere near the amount of resources as an active GPS mapping system. Okay, so don't think that that marketing means that it's a high powered device. It's actually blurring the lines With your high powered devices. Your top end.
Speaker 1:They're usually sold as business gaming, that type of thing. The gaming part of it is more to do with its graphics and its performance, its screen display, how quickly it refreshes In terms of converting that to what you're going to use in the traveler apps and mapping. That means what happens when I move my finger fast, zoom in and zoom out. So look good, graphics is a factor to look at. Probably the biggest key and David touched on it before is the dollar point. The value in devices has a big factor of that graphics, but it also combines on the graphics card.
Speaker 1:The way the hardware is built is the CPU, so that's the processing power, the actual speed of the device. It's to do with how well does it multitask. Now, david's probably best to pick up here on the discussion about the technicals of what does the app need in terms of how it is doing things. It's built to use location data because you're moving and in it it's not just showing your location on the map, but in the background there's a lot of data, so your places, your tracks and information on the screen. That is also using that location data. There's a lot of smarts in the background and I suppose we don't want to go too technical right now in this discussion about that. The wind's just blowing over everything here, hang on, but it is a factor in why does the device need to have good grunt and power. Dave, do you want to comment on that?
Speaker 2:Yeah, you missed the one that is the most grunt-using component of the app and that's been mapped. Oh, the screen size. The screen size is the map resolution. Yeah, sorry, the trick with the phones and I'll just go back again. I'm making a bit of a differentiation between tablet devices and phone devices. One, because the screen is so much different in size. So your five or six inch, seven inch phone to your 9, 10, 11 or bigger tablet, the screen sizes are immensely different. Now, why is that important? Well, we're putting more map on a bigger device, we're putting more PRIs on a bigger device, so the device itself. So to have this great resolution where you can see more detail and all of this stuff, that requires more processing power, more GPU graphic processing unit and more CPU central processing unit power to make the thing deliver.
Speaker 2:Just in some, you know, you look at some of the tiles, even in our vector mapping, the data itself, it's vectorized. Some of those vector tiles, certainly around that, the higher level zoom, once you get over 13 levels of 13 zoom level, in cities like in Perth or in Sydney, melbourne and those sorts of places where the majority of people live and there's heaps of roads, there's heaps of stuff, there's heaps of parks there's heaps of all the things that we've mapped on the map. So there's heaps of them. Some of those tiles are up to a megabyte in size to render a piece of the screen. Now on some of those tablets we might be rendering up to 10 or 15 of those tiles either on the screen or in memory, because it keeps a perimeter around those, around what's on the screen already loaded into the system so that if you pan around or you move, it'll already be preloaded and pre-capes those tiles. So fitting more of those things onto the screen requires more processing power. Yeah, a comparison between even the CPU in phone X if it had exactly the same Processing power, and bits and pieces in tablet white tablet white will probably be slower because of the graphics processing requirement to make it, to make, to make to fill the screen.
Speaker 2:So we need CPU. To get the, we need CPU and storage. So we need to get the data off the, off the internal storage. We need to pass it through, render it as a graphics. We need to get it through the CPU to the GPU. The GPU's got a render. It's bigger on the, on the biggest screen. So you certainly need more power on this, more places. More on the bits and pieces is going to be Incidental, but it is more power. Yeah, the core of it comes to screen resolution. So you'll also notice if you're a stutely user. Yeah, a lot.
Speaker 2:If you've booed up the app in the city and you boot up the app in the region, the region will be significantly faster when you're out in a less less dense map Part of Australia, so out on a road great central road during the middle of it there's absolutely nothing around you except a couple of roads.
Speaker 2:That vector tile data might be in the kilobytes of size. It might be five kilobytes I'm only making an assertion Versus and and we might load up if there were 20 tiles at five kilobytes each. So what? We've loaded about 50k, 100k of data. We come into the city and load the same thing and we might be loading 20k, 20 meg, 10 meg, 5 meg, so that when you boot the app up in the region you'll see it faster. So this all relies on the processing power of the product. So you know, the tablet, the tablet, the tablets. Whilst they're fantastic for screen resolution, the manufacturers are a few steps behind in the processing power that they're delivering for you in the same level of thing that you're going to get with your phone. So hence the price point, hence you need to if you want to use the product nicely. Take that, take the bigger leap and get the more powerful.
Speaker 1:Yeah so look, having heard all those technical reasons, the real takeaway, though, is you get what you're paying for, so you don't really have to worry about any specs and understanding all the details of what they've said. The takeaway is the higher Cost is covering all those technicalities and it's there for a reason. And look, this is the next part of the complication is okay, most people are saying I want a bigger Screen size because when I'm traveling, I want to be able to view that, but then there's also a compromise between what's available on the market to buy, and I had a look today and guess what size some of these tablets are in Android, 12 inch now. Last year, the problem was 10 inch when tablets first started, though a more seven and eight inch and then, as you would have, noticed you can't buy an eight inch tablet anymore.
Speaker 1:But good news is I just had a quick look again Comparing Apple and Android brand new specs today on the internet. The iPad mini, I still reckon, is a very good option for people, but only if you're buying the latest model, again for the reasons Davis just said about the CPU. The iPad mini Older models were quite an underpowered device. The iPad mini 6 is has caught up. But what's good about the iPad mini 6 is its screen sizes the perfect compromise. It's an 8 inch, okay.
Speaker 1:So if you're that's, you cannot find an Android 8 inch in a high-powered new device. They just don't exist. And I think if you find one now, it'll be so old that it doesn't even run Android 7 anymore. It's like it's out of the question. So if the smallest size Compromise of tablet that you're after is 8 inch, I'd steer you down to the iPad mini 6. Okay Now the other iPad out at the moment, just so that you know, the latest is the 10th gen, 10th generation of iPad. If you're looking at buying iPad, there are different models, the pros, the top of the line then you've got the air.
Speaker 2:But the pros which we get, it's like it's like a computer, it's like 12 or 13 inch.
Speaker 1:Well, this is also the issue. When you're looking at your Android, you've got your 12 inch and that the s9 FE comes in every size, from 10.9 up to 12.4 inch for the same S9. However, then it's got these letters after it, so s9 FE plus is 12.4 inch, s9 FE is 10.9.
Speaker 2:Is the FE is problematic, as it used to be. Well, they had now have an ultra, yeah so look, the FE.
Speaker 1:We've been a bit concerned about the FE of any device. Keep in mind that stands for fan edition and in doing that it's a cheaper version of the ultra edition. So you'll, the altars are the top of the line and you'll see that in the price point.
Speaker 2:They have FE and SE. They've also fan edition. You know Plus and all of that they also have light and all of those, all of those differentiations mean less.
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, less money and less performance. So it's a, it's a, it's a difficult. It's a difficult thing, you know it's not to say it won't work. So let's just get this clear all new devices and all last year's new devices, and even once three years ago, they are all going to run the traveler app. Okay, no problem, they've all got enough grunt to do it. However, how well do they do do it?
Speaker 2:Your satisfaction with the product and your usage and I you know and the longevity of the product.
Speaker 1:So let's just move on to that part. The longevity of the product is part of the price point. If you look very carefully, a lot of the web pages both Apple and Android are to blame for this. I had another look today. They've actually won't tell you what version of the operating system is installed on that brand new device. I went into the specs and they would not. I cannot find what version. Okay, so you've got a really delve and do some internet searching. Just do some googling, put in the model and ask what does it come loaded with Path. The people at the store won't even know if you should go in. This is part of the problem.
Speaker 2:Some of this stuff is way easier to research online because the store people really don't.
Speaker 1:It's really try they will have a reasonable.
Speaker 2:Reasonable understanding of the products that they have not anything else and also for the mainstream.
Speaker 1:Keep in mind, using devices offline with GPS Technology is not mainstream. What we're talking about with your Requirements for when you're traveling and you're out of mobile service and you're wanting to get location data, it doesn't come from the Wi-Fi and it doesn't come from your mobile data. This seems to be unfathomable to a lot of storekeepers selling devices. They don't get it and I have spoken to customers a little bit disheartened that have bought an iPad Wi-Fi only and being told that, yes, it works offline and it has location data.
Speaker 2:I want to just touch on that we didn't actually talk about the Apple platform. Yeah, as a purchasing decision, because we did a fair bit on that Android. Should we just talk about those Apple decision points?
Speaker 1:Is this a cut point in our recording?
Speaker 2:No, because we missed the Apple stuff. So I think okay just to, just to go back, because we did talk about. Tablets and the androids and the bits and pieces and we talked about the pricing. You know some of the bits and pieces of the Apple and that the Apple products exist, but we didn't actually Go through the various options with the apples. Now, as Michelle said quite rightly, the Apple Wi-Fi only units. They do not physically contain a GPS chip in the hardware.
Speaker 2:So don't, don't be confused, don't be don't be fooled by some store assistant that knows better. There is no GPS. There is no GPS unit in an Apple Wi-Fi device. It just does not exist. There also isn't GPS is in MacBooks.
Speaker 1:So but it doesn't mean you can't use the app on the app. On the app. It's a solution.
Speaker 2:And there's probably a possibly a better solution depending on your usage requirements. Yeah, if you want to have the GPS built into the Apple device by a phone, because they all have it, every single phone model, every iPhone has a built-in GPS, but every iPad doesn't. The ones that do other ones that have the SIM card for mobile service connectivity and they're sold as Wi-Fi plus cellular iPad.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so they've got the cellular.
Speaker 1:You've got to have the cellular part, even though you have the GPS and we look this is a stupid, confusing, vague terminology that Apple have adopted because You're not getting the GPS from the cellular. So what's happened is it's a marketing decision that they've made In how they build the device. They've said we're going to have two price points, with Wi-Fi, with iPad. The iPad that has the cellular capability will be the one that costs more. It's also going to be the one that we're going to put the more expensive GPS chip into.
Speaker 2:Yeah, all about about two dollars at manufacturing. Yeah, okay.
Speaker 1:So you won't actually have to put a SIM card into the cellular iPad to be able to use GPS. So that's a really important point that I know trips up some people.
Speaker 2:You don't have to be on. You don't have to have the SIM installed, the GPS chip and the cellular functionality Integrated into the hardware.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so the whole idea is you just need the hardware that comes in that particular option.
Speaker 2:Now the other choice with the Wi-Fi units is to get a Bluetooth GPS. You can do this with Android tablets as well. This is how you can go up Windows. You're not limited to what device you can use the.
Speaker 1:External GPS receiver.
Speaker 2:We've got direct experience with Garmin Glow. We have one that we've traveled with Garmin Glow 2. We've had it for a few years now. It's been very reliable, works quite well. There are some others on the market. They're all fairly, they're all reasonable. We've got you two people that we know of that are using a whole myriad of different Bluetooth GPS units.
Speaker 1:Can I just explain a little bit, because I talk to a lot of people on the phone that get confused about how does the external GPS work and whether it's a pro or a con in the buying decision of the tablet.
Speaker 1:So first up, I will just say last year we bought a brand new iPad and we chose the bottom of the line iPad at the time in terms of the lowest amount of storage and it was Wi-Fi only.
Speaker 1:But that was because what we really like about the ability to use a Bluetooth External GPS receiver is that it's just a very small thing that you put on the dash. Now to get GPS, you need line of sight, so when you're offline you need to be able to get line of sight. So the thing is you put this external GPS receiver on your dash at the front of the windscreen inside the car the the rest of the time you can have your very expensive iPad either folded up under the seat in the door pocket. It does not need line of sight, because the GPS using Bluetooth that's Disconnected is is all that's needed. It's the thing that's getting line of sight and, using the Bluetooth connectivity, it is talking to the iPad to transmit that data. Now we have tested that, as have thousands of app users and its mainstream knowledge in any Navigation product out there that this technology works very, very well, so don't see this as a limitation.
Speaker 1:Well there's a cost point. If you actually compare the cost of an iPad cellular of the same Storage compared to the iPad Wi-Fi without the GPS built-in, you're actually going to save yourself a little bit because it costs about a hundred and forty dollars to buy an external Garmin glow to GPS receiver, compared to about three hundred dollars difference to fifty or three hundred more for the same, for the same Apple, yeah for the same Apple unit In terms of it's the rest of the.
Speaker 2:Don't get us wrong either. It's fantastic to have a SIM card in it, have the thing online and then it all syncs and it does everything whenever it's in service. So that's all great as well, but it's not necessary. It's not, it's not, it's not necessary.
Speaker 1:So if you're looking to save money on the iPad, that's the way to do it. Yeah, by the Wi-Fi and an external GPS, one of the other things you know in terms of power management.
Speaker 2:One of the bigger things from her using the external GPS is that you aren't using a GPS in your device. Gps so we're power hungry because they're basically receiving data from satellites all over the place is doing a lot of mathematical Computations. What a lot of people also that realizes that GPS is one way, it's only being received. You aren't transmitting to the GPS, you're only receiving GPS data. So it does use it. The processing power to do the triangulation, the coordination is fabulous. They're receiving all, it's all done on the chip, but it runs hot, they get, they get warm and they use a fair bit of power. So when the GPS is on, enabled and running full-time, yeah, you will consume power. So if you've got an external Bluetooth GPS unit that's away from your phone, your power requirements on your on your tablet or phone are much less. People then say how convenient is you got a turn on the GPS, you got a turn on the thing you don't actually do.
Speaker 2:The way that we've plugged in is if you plug in the Garmin glow Into a cigarette lighter adapter and you run the cable just up under the dash. In fact, three months in any of our videos. I put the. I've got a dash mat and so when we're here to carpet mat thing over the dash and when you put the Garmin glow has a tendency to get hot, like everything. It's black, it's great color, it's a stupidly, there's a stupid design color Because they do overheat. So putting it, I actually put ours under the dash mat, just jam it under the dash mat, run the cord down to the cigarette Lighter adapter and then what'll actually happen is sure I need to turn it off, but if I forget it doesn't matter. If you sit there running all night it will go flat.
Speaker 2:It does have its own batteries in it, so they are designed to be battery Work alone. You can take it, you can throw it in your backpack if you're going for a hike with your iPad, so you're not limited. Just leave it in the car. It does work on battery power, but in the car every time you get in, if it's turned off because of battery management or power saving, or it's run out of battery or you've manually turned it off.
Speaker 2:When you get in the car the next day and you put your iPad in there and you turn the car on, the GPS will immediately come on when the power is applied through the cigarette lighter adapter. So you don't have to think about turning this thing on and up all the time, it can just sit there and do that job for you, and you can share the Bluetooth connectivity with more than one device. We've had three or four devices using our Garmin globe at the same time and that all works very well. So if, if price point is a thing and you don't need the cellular part of your tablets and stuff, then yeah, get the get the less, get the Wi-Fi only. Ipads, most of the most of the Samsung's and stuff, those tablets, are they all connected?
Speaker 1:Yeah, they all seem to have built in GPS. They have seen no, not one. No, okay, but they all have GPS. It seems that all the Android.
Speaker 2:We haven't actually found yet that we're aware of an Android tablet that doesn't have an internal GPS.
Speaker 2:But, again, you can use the Bluetooth version and shut down the internal one and get that power management or battery management saving in place as well, and also that line of sight connectivity to the GPS. That's not to say that everyone should have one. We have two phones and you should see what we travel with in the car. We have two tablets, we have two laptops, we've got a couple of iPads, we've got the phones and they're all basically running the travel app at the same time.
Speaker 1:For anyone that's listening. If you actually want to see some video of this, jump onto the Explorers YouTube channel or follow us on Instagram or Facebook. We do constantly share a lot of content about our setup and you can go back through and have a look at some of that now if you want to have a look.
Speaker 2:And so we've got a lot of this stuff, and it all doesn't necessarily have to have the best line of sight, now that we've got multiple satellite providers. So the GPS satellite system, there's two there's the American and the Russian satellite systems that we're using the Air Force NASA and GPS, so there's two of them that we're using, and it's not uncommon now to be picking up 20, 30 satellites in view at any one time, whereas years ago that was unfathomable and we would be waiting two or three minutes for the things to acquire to find how many satellites were there.
Speaker 2:Now this stuff is so much better, and with AGPS as well, the assisted GPS stuff I was wanted to talk about AGPS.
Speaker 1:And when we do talk about iPads the Wi-Fi only iPad one of the things if you are going into a store that is going to confuse you is they will tell you that it does work offline and it's because of this feature that David just mentioned, then called AGPS assisted GPS how it actually works and this is my take on it and I'm not going to explain it in technical terms like David might they may even make a mistake, so please correct me.
Speaker 1:But my understanding and the way I explain it to people is that in a Wi-Fi only device like the iPad or that does not have the built-in GPS or an external GPS receiver, as you are travelling and you'll see this in urban areas it does seem to be giving you location you go. Where's that getting it from? It is not getting it because you don't have your SIM card in. It's not getting it from mobile data. So you're thinking and the storekeeper is thinking it's giving you real GPS because you're offline. It's using fixed, known GPS positions that are actually being transmitted. They're public nodes. So shopping centres, some towers, some buildings, mine sites and places like that are actually transmitting their known, fixed GPS location. And what happens?
Speaker 2:is. It's through the Wi-Fi, though. Yeah, the A, that's all through Wi-Fi.
Speaker 1:So the AGPS system is able to roam and pick up this information and in some cases, if you're in an urban area, it appears to be accurate enough, you've got to.
Speaker 2:It will actually track you, and we've tested it on our iPad. Once you start moving, it gets a bit sketchy.
Speaker 1:Yeah, the further you get away from these actual fixed nodes and it's looking for the next one, it starts to jump. And you'll see it, there's quite a delay in the position data it's picking up while it's moving away from the last fixed one, trying to find the next one, and so it'll jump randomly and then eventually it'll start to stray off the road. So it's not reliable.
Speaker 2:There's a couple of technologies that are making that happen and most of it, as Michelle was alluding, is Wi-Fi. Even in your house you will be an AGPS hotspot, unless you know how to disable it, and if you use anything to do with Google, you will probably be an AGPS hotspot at your house. So when you're watching AGPS signaling work and you're driving down the street, if you turn your GPS off and you drive down the street with AGPS on, what you'll see is that you'll actually jump between houses and buildings. So you're always a few hundred metres or a hundred or ten, fifteen, twenty metres off the road, but you're jumping past buildings. You're jumping past these buildings because the system's detected, the Wi-Fi signaling is being brought broadcast, that it's picking up. It's all still secure and private because it's not actually giving these things aren't actually giving you your position away or your known location. It's basically a cross-reference table that says IP address of XYZ, and I'm not going to go into IP addresses but IP address.
Speaker 2:XYZ is connected to this Wi-Fi network and we know this Wi-Fi network is at you know, 10 Jones Street, some suburb.
Speaker 2:So as you drive past 10 Jones Street, some suburb, you will be picking up that signal and it'll be, and then the system will go and ask Google, whose IP addresses this, and it will basically send back that position. So this happens really quickly. But as you're moving around, the ASSISTED GPS functionality is using Wi-Fi and I also believe it does use some sort of cell tower triangulation, but it doesn't have, it doesn't use a SIM to do it. It triangulates off the cell tower network. There's a few complexities. I'm trying to make it relatively techless, a techless explanation, and I hope I'm right. If there's an AGPS engineer out there that can give me a heads up, that knows more about it, that's fine. If I'm totally wrong, let me know.
Speaker 1:Right, a comment in the YouTube right now if there's any questions you've got about that part of the technology. I'd prefer that people start communicating in the comments section, because then we know where there's more information that needs to be explained or not.
Speaker 2:And the AGPS, the ASSISTED GPS thing, is the thing that allows us to acquire our GPS position lightningly fast when we're in a reasonably tight, when we're in an urban populated area, fast.
Speaker 1:Now that's the key, that the other thing is, people don't understand when they're looking at the specs and buying a device. Your device is programmed whether it's a phone or a tablet, an iPad to give you or give the program. You're using the fastest possible way of getting a bit of location data to show you where you are on the map, so that functionality is built into the device and it will use all of those systems randomly and it makes the decision not random it makes the decision as to which system AGPS, offline GPS or mobile data is giving the quickest display of that location data.
Speaker 1:And sometimes they can get it wrong and, without going on a tangent too much, some of that technology is really complicated for the software development that David's written into the Explorer's Traveler app, because when you have been offline for some period of time and you are moving back into an urban area where it's starting to pick up AGPS and you've got your Wi-Fi functions turned on, there's some funnies that can happen in the background and many years ago we used to occasionally see some GPS glitches occur in people's tracking and they were asking questions why does this happen? So we've put a lot of effort. David has put a lot of development and research and testing into trying to make sure that when an offline device does come back into a town or even passing through the town, that we don't have any random GPS drifts and jumps occurring. So it's pretty robust.
Speaker 2:We've seen it at night. If you're camping just outside the cellular service range, if you're travelling just outside the cellular service and you have a cellular device. Sometimes we've seen it at night time when the atmospheric conditions are conducive for the signals to travel just that little bit further. Sometimes we get these jumps on the map where it moves from where you are to some town in some other place. It's generally not that far. If it moves further than that, there's something else has gone wrong and we've had that in the past. But those sorts of issues have all been out now. But you do see things jumping around. So it is very complicated. In your device when you get it, do you say should you turn off a GPS? Should you leave it on? Should you do this? Should you do realistically the default settings? A GPS will be part of the mix.
Speaker 1:You don't have control over these things.
Speaker 2:You do on some. You can go on some. Some of them are there to just go. I only want to use the GPS. I don't want a GPS. On most of the devices you can make that setting. So you can do it also on a lot of Android devices. So, should you know, just leave it all turned on. You want the highest performance pickup of where you currently are so that when you boot up the device again, it can immediately work out where you are on a GPS Again. If you're out in the bush, you'll see that it takes a little bit longer to acquire your position if you're in a completely remote, turned off, isolated area than if you are. Of course, the GPS will remember where it was when you turned it off. If you happen to have turned it off and travelled a couple of hundred k's, it could take a little bit of time for it to reapply when you put it back up. These are just some.
Speaker 2:This is just a technology thing. It doesn't need to be complicated. I'm not trying to make it complicated. Just leave the settings that you've got on your device. But understand that if you're, if you're travelling with a Wi-Fi device or even with what you think is a GPS device and you are basically jumping maybe a hundred or 200 metres as you drive down the streets of Suburbia. Your GPS is sort of following you, but it's like a hundred metres behind you, it's a little bit off the road and it's jumping through people's houses. What you're seeing there is pure A GPS and no GPS. So that's what you'll get on a Wi-Fi iPad. And yeah, as why does it work? Reasonably well, because when you're sitting in your house, your little A GPS node knows that the IP address that you're broadcasting on your internet connectivity belongs at your address, and so it immediately can work out where you are because of your Wi-Fi connectivity. So that's just a quick introduction to that level of technology.
Speaker 1:He's going to water. I think it's time for us to drink a bit of water. I'm just checking how hot the temperature is. We're starting to feel the effects of it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's getting warmer, so I think we've covered off the Android devices and the Apple devices and realistically, you make that decision point on your own. We go through both. We go year or two here with the Apple and we switch back to Android, and then we go Apple and we go. At the end of the day it becomes a UI. The other devices that you might want to use on that device become part of the equation. Obviously, if you're putting it in your car or you want to get a tablet with a special mount or you're going to do an Android head unit in your car, you know those decision points determine what to look for on the specs of the device.
Speaker 2:But the reason why we chose to stay with the standard platforms of these devices for our app is that you don't want to have to carry another device and we carry such high powered computerised things with our phones. It makes perfect sense that we should use that. Why force you to have to have a dedicated piece of hardware to do this job? So make sure you buy a good machine as much as you can comfortably justify your bank balance. You'll get much longer jevity out of the device if you spend a bit more and you'll get a much better experience, one using our app, but two also using all the other apps and features of that device.
Speaker 1:We didn't talk much about operating systems and how the life of them is about three years on manufacturer updates and how important that is it's becoming more commonly understood.
Speaker 2:Google. You've got to understand. Android is written with Google and Android is an open operating system platform. Apple is completely written by Apple and it sits with Apple's environment and life cycle and they control and secure their environment and life cycle very tightly. Obviously, the Android market is open slatter. Google is not Samsung. Google is not Lenovo. They do make Pixel, so that's their jump into this market, but at the end of the day, it's a load of disparate developers or hardware manufacturers that create these products and they are life cycle limited. So if you release a piece of hardware today and it can run, say, android 13, you may be able to support it through Android 15 and 16. But there might just be something in Android 17 or 18 that knocks out its performance. All these manufacturers will life cycle their available operating system updates for a certain period of time and, as Michelle was looting, three years is about the most we've seen so far. Apple does have a tendency to go a little bit further.
Speaker 2:A lot further than a lot of the Android device manufacturers and that's also because a lot of Android devices are on the least level spec so they won't take those next operating systems moving forward. So buying those cheaper fan edition and the cheaper streaming machines and all of those devices then become the limiting factor. So the manufacturer limits their operating system updates to the least common denominator of that hardware platform. If they've got seven or eight machines in one year specific release and it goes from a cludgy piece of hardware to a super-duper piece of hardware, they will probably still life cycle the operating system across all of those devices based on the least powerful machine. So three years is about the life cycle of that. So, realistically, where do you want to be when you buy today? Whatever the latest is is where you want to be targeting your purchase decision. It's a bit different again if you're buying head units because, like tablets, they're a bit behind, because it's not as common as buying a phone.
Speaker 1:So let's so, talking about head units, breaking it down in this most basic point. A lot of people don't understand All the aftermarket. Head units are effectively an Android tablet and they are all built in China and there's lots of different brands out there. So this is exactly what David had just explained before. The manufacturer of the device is using the open source Android operating system to run the internal system of it, to run the software. So that's what you get when you buy a head unit. You're buying an Android tablet, and so, in terms of the buying decision and particularly putting your apps on it, you're effectively there's no difference between the head unit and the tablet in how you obtain the Explorer's Traveler app or any other app and download it. You're going to be just tapping on your Google Play Store and making your purchase and your download from within the head unit using those apps, the Play Store app to put it on. I was asked that question this morning but, as David said, the manufacturing device Now this is interesting.
Speaker 1:Some of these head units we've seen and we've tested quite a lot. We've had some manufacturers send some to us for testing because they get mixed reviews from their customers and they want to make sure that everything works. We've had a lot of interest from head unit distributors in Australia about the Explorer's Traveler app. From what they're telling us is a huge amount of demand and is the app of choice. So they want to hear from us directly how well it works and where they can improve. One of the big things first of all that we can see between different ones is the screen resolution. You can't really change the resolution, so when you buy a device, have a look at the resolution specs. That is the difference between the manufacturers of head units. So I would number one use that as your point of comparison.
Speaker 2:No point getting a 10 inch, no point getting this great 10 inch head unit when an olive or render is 800 by 600 pixel, because it looks terrible.
Speaker 1:What happens when the resolution is low on a big screen device?
Speaker 2:Surely we know about that now, don't we?
Speaker 1:I don't know I don't think so. It's just in simple terms. Basically, it makes everything look bigger than it needs to be, which means you're actually not getting advantage of the big screen because it's not fitting as much detail into the big screen. Does that make sense?
Speaker 2:Well, in a short thing, trying to do it through a podcast where I can't actually kind of show you. So let's take a screen resolution of 800, 600. So that's basically saying that we've got 800 dots across and 600 dots down, and that's. Each one of those dots represents a little light. If we're thinking about it in easy terminology, each one of those dots represents a multicolour tiximedia colour light bulb, and so you can turn any one of those 800 across and 600 down, a lot of rows and a lot of columns, light bulbs on and off, in any colour you like to render the picture on the screen. If you've got 800, 600 in a two inch display and 800, 600 in a 100 inch television screen, you wouldn't even be able to look at 800, 600 on a big television screen because it would just be the dot sizes would be too big. It would be stupid, you wouldn't. You wouldn't see anything, it'd be pixelated, it'd be very pixelated.
Speaker 1:Glurry, so 800, 600 is low resolution 800, 600 is low resolution.
Speaker 2:These days our iPhones and stuff are around about 3,600 by 2,700 or 2,800. And then they've got this thing called the iPad resolution. Oh yeah, 20, 230, 4x14, 40, oh, I'm 1570, 1752 by 2,600.
Speaker 1:Yeah, landscape, so they're big.
Speaker 2:So they're reasonable. So if you think about, there's 2,304 lines across and there's 1,440 rows, there's a lot of little lights to switch on and off, and that's why we need the graphics processing power to make all those things be able to turn on and off smoothly and stream nicely across so that our experience and it also our eye our eye pickup at 20 to 30 frames a second works so that the motion looks smooth and all that sort of fancy stuff that you get.
Speaker 2:This is all the difference with the fancy TV versus the cheap TV. It's all the same. It's scan lines and it's the speed to display and the graphic processing is the speed to render on the screen. So you know you want to make sure you've got the best resolution. So if you go and get and I, there are some head units, unfortunately I know, that have pretty poor screen resolution, whilst everything runs right, the app looks right, the buttons are big, the maps too big, the layout doesn't look 100% because the resolution for the screen size isn't right. So again, get the best resolution that you can have a look at these things in real terms. The other way you can sort of it's a bit hard to change the resolution on some of these devices that don't let you change the resolution like we used to be on On no PC. Yeah, you used to go and change the resolution, but there's no point looking at a 27 inch or a 24 inch computer screen and then setting the resolution to 800, 600 and getting the gauge and what it looks like. But if you do do that, you will see exactly what I'm talking about.
Speaker 2:If you've got your PC at home, change the resolution from probably whatever you're looking at HD, you might be looking at a 4k or, you know, might even have a 4k screen. 4k screen is just another discussion about the resolution number of pixels, number of dots across and number of dots down. 4k bends 1000. So there's, you know that if you change your computer down and render it at 800, 600 or anything less than the optimum resolution, you'll start to see it pixelating, and that's what this is all about. So you want to get as best resolution you can. It's impossible for me to say because it depends on the size of the screen. But you know, as I say, you know your phones and stuff. The phones are greater than these 2300. These have got retina displays.
Speaker 1:So a retina display we say one and two times retina and one and two times retina or three times retina.
Speaker 2:That's basically taking the resolution, the native resolution of the display panel, and multiplying it by one time, two times, three times or four times. Two retina, two retina, what was it, what was it, what was even the terminology of retina? So if you're two times retina, you're basically take, you're doubling the resolution of that screen. So these resolutions and these screens, they're so high now, and they're really high because our camera processing power on these phones is so high. So most of our phones are made for cameras or our cameras are made for phones. We only have worked out the two of those.
Speaker 2:The resolution on the screens are so impressive these days, but they're so impressive on the small format device on the phone. So in your Android tablets. And again, the Android head unit. And the other thing to remember is that if you want a head unit in your car, whether it's the one that's already in your car or whether it's the one you're going to buy for your car, it will be Android. There is no such thing as an Apple slated or Apple manufactured car head unit. They have a thing called car play, but no head unit. They don't manufacture anything and, as I said earlier, apple control their whole life cycle. So there is nothing. There's nothing coming, there's no plan. There's not going to be an Apple head unit. You will be buying Android and you'll be buying Android even if you want to use it under car play, and we'll discuss that when we get to that.
Speaker 1:Okay, I'm wondering if we maybe should discuss that because, however, we haven't discussed the third platform, windows and that's for a reason. So why don't we just touch? On Windows it only needs a few short things to be said and Dave a little explain why.
Speaker 2:Okay, windows only just recently, and in our one of our last newsletters, we announced depreciation of support for Windows.
Speaker 1:moving forward, we haven't actually announced oh yes, we did announce it last week. I'm so sorry, I almost forgot.
Speaker 2:If we didn't, if we didn't, we just did.
Speaker 2:That's what we're worried about, so the depreciation of support for Windows doesn't mean we're turning Windows off today. It doesn't mean we're turning Windows off tomorrow. I can't tell you the day that we're actually going to have to turn Windows off, but for the last two years we've had very little operating system assistance with being able to move forward on the Windows platform using the development technologies that we've written the app around. So there's a few things that we're. There's a few options we're looking at using, doing it in a slightly different way, but the current slated Explorers Traveler app for Windows is being depreciated so it wasn't as widely used as these other devices. It does everything exactly the same as we all have. You can run it on your computer, but we also have a web version that you can use on your computer, and we'll discuss that as well.
Speaker 1:So two things here, but.
Speaker 2:Windows. The major reason that we've had to put down the support is lack of ongoing. Microsoft dropped the ball on some of the technology that we had used.
Speaker 1:Microsoft dropped the ball. A massive, a massive no-year flashing light, a number of developers got upset about this.
Speaker 2:They have got solutions around it, but they didn't fit with the technology model that myself and hundreds of thousands of other developers have used. So, yeah, the support for that as it stands in its current fashion, is disappearing. I do expect to be able to have an answer to that and still be able to run on Windows into the future, but we've got to move through this depreciation to move forward on a solution, because I think we're going to be forced into the depreciation.
Speaker 1:So what you're basically saying is we may not make future versions of the Traveler app through the Microsoft Store.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we may deliver it in a different way.
Speaker 1:We may deliver it in a different way, but it's going to take some time. I want people to also have a takeaway on this comment. For those that are listening in that already own the Windows version, what does it mean for you?
Speaker 2:Oh, okay. Well, what it means for you is that you'll still be able to run the Traveler app that you have now, and you'll be able to run further Traveler apps until I can't until we either get to a point where we have to turn it off. We're already running into support issues. For those of you that have used the Windows version, one of the things that you'll see now is that the store links are up there. You have to buy the EOtopo map update through our website because of the support. The store support depreciated from the way that I was able to access store support. So you know, these things are slowly falling into the equation and one day there'll be something that they'll turn off or develop the pre-set, something that I can't recover from. What we will be doing up until that time is we'll keep releasing them. We'll keep releasing our updates as long as we can.
Speaker 1:But it might start to vary you.
Speaker 2:It may be different, it might come out in a slightly later day or date than we may do the other ones, but we'll keep running it, we'll keep supporting it, we'll keep putting it out there until we can't. At that time we would make a version that will stay in the store and you'll have access to keep downloading it, that version in the store, for as long as possible.
Speaker 1:So if you've got a license, you've purchased it. Well, if we have to remove it from the store, it'll only be removed for new buyers. That means existing buyers will still be able to get a new device and download it to that device because it will support that version, keep running that version. That's not updating and whether.
Speaker 2:I have the potential to still allow you to do map updates within those versions that I just have. We just haven't formulated that part of the plan exactly yet as to whether, if we cut our first version 9.6 or something we'd be able to run 23, 24, 25, 26 year top on map updates that decision point. I haven't yet formulated how we're going to manage that. But don't be concerned, if you're a Windows user, or even if you just bought it, we're not going to leave you in the lurch. You'll be able to keep using the product for a number of years.
Speaker 2:The appreciation of support is really just to let you know that the platform and the technology is currently the way, that it's currently developed and written.
Speaker 1:The Windows platform has become a little bit problematic, so if you're listening into that and you haven't yet got the Traveler app and you're wondering what device to use. Take that as a hint perhaps go towards Apple or Android, because that's easier for us to develop on and that's where the technology is All right. So I think the next thing for us to talk about is we need to talk about the head units, but I also would like us to touch on charging of the device. Oh, okay, yeah.
Speaker 2:So reasonably quickly or not reasonably quickly, depending on how we go with this. As I said earlier, we travel with a lot of these devices in our car all at once and Michelle does get questions periodically from people about how do I keep my device charged, because that's not using the GPS to wipe out the battery. And the answer is yes, it does. But all of these devices you would hope they do have enough inbound power supply capability to run the machine with everything turned on. So there should not be a device that you can turn on more features than its power supply is capable of keeping up with. So from a manufacturing engineering point of view, we would build the machine so that the GPS was on full power, the screen was on full power, everything was on full power. The availability of bringing power into that device should be sufficient that you can keep it running. The difference is have you put the right plug on the other end, the right device connecting you to the power source to deliver enough power to make that work? It's not that complicated, but there are some new technologies that have come out in recent years that have been adopted by most of the manufacturers. In the old days, usb was a five-volt system and that's all that ever was. Now with DP, the different connectivity types PD, dpd, pd with the PD connectivity, now each one of those same little micro USB ports. It's not just five volts, it delivers five volts, nine volts, 12 volts, 18 volts and I think 20 volts, and that's just so that we can power these high-powered devices through that little piece of thin cable. If you're an electronics engineering kind of person, you understand this dynamic. I wondered for ages how you get 80 or 90 watts for your MacBook charging through a USB-C connector and understanding how tiny those little connectors are, if it's all coming through a five-volt or it's not coming through a five-volt, it's coming through it more. I'm not trying to get too technical. In our car we travel with a single-cigarette lighter plug-in device. It's got seven USB ports on it. It's got 3.2-inch connectors. It's got Quick Charge 3 interface, which is an early version of the PD thing is the QC3.0, and then there's QC3.1 and 3.2. And that's where that technology came from. But it's using this square-style USB connector, not the little USB-C micro connector. As I say, we've got a thing in there with seven of it. We smash it because we can have two iPads, two phones all running at once, and also the gum and glow. We charge cameras and all those bits of pieces all at the same time. So it's not impossible.
Speaker 2:You've just got to get the right charger for your device type and try to avoid the minimum device specifications. But have a look at the specifications for your device. If it's a PD, you want to get a PD input system and you'll want 20, 30, or 40 watts on that and you'll want to make sure the wattage that you're providing is the maximum that you should be providing for that device or get the next size up. They will get the next size up charging because they'll only take what they can take. They won't charge. They won't take more. So if you've got a PD 80 watt charger you can plug your phone into it. You're not going to blow up your phone but you're not using the full power of that 80 watts. You might only be using 15 or 20 to charge your phone. So in that new technology, just get the next size up. In the older technology, minimum 3.2 amp charge on the connector where you plug your usage device on and realistically you should be fine.
Speaker 1:And David, can you just help people know where do they buy such a charger from? Can they just get it from the local store? Yeah, just go to the local store, Right, you don't have to buy it online.
Speaker 2:No, no no, you can go anywhere. Obviously, you can get stuff from Apple, you can get stuff from Samsung stores, you can get from JB Hi-Fi, Officeworks, all those places. But don't buy the $19 one, buy the $35 one.
Speaker 1:That's again you get what you're paying for.
Speaker 2:Don't buy the cheapest one, buy the most expensive one that your bank balance can afford, and then you should be coming. 3.2 amps on the standard USB old square style plug-in devices and whatever device type you need or other new appliances.
Speaker 1:Start with the VD stuff. Okay, all right, so we've come in a lot there, but it's time to perhaps start talking about the head unit.
Speaker 2:We did a bit of head unit. Oh no, car, play the car play. That's what I meant, Okay so we also recently just released.
Speaker 2:We got a new car play AI box in came through from our mates at EC Off-Road and we're having a bit of a play with that, and I went to a Volkswagen Polo, one of my mates' cars, and I don't actually have a car that's got a wide car play in it. It does need wide car play, these things, but the 300 series, land Cruises and all the new cars all seem to have these wide car play systems in them. They also have Android Auto, so generally, if your head unit has Android Auto, it'll probably have car play. They seem to come out with the two, and so the AI box is an Android computer, if you need to. If you want to have a look, jump onto our YouTube channel. The video is there or it's going to be there.
Speaker 2:Yes, it's going to be up by the time people hear this podcast, by the time you hear this it should be published, and in that I've gone into the car and plugged in the box and show you how it works Effectively. You're basically plugging in an Android operating system little, teeny, weeny little computer into your car play head unit and as soon as it's detected, your car play head unit thinks it's an iPhone.
Speaker 1:Yes, it thinks it's an iPhone.
Speaker 2:Oh, sorry, sorry, sorry the car play unit, when you plug it in the AI box, loads into your car play system as an iPhone and basically what it does then is the iPhone. That interface emulates an Android, the whole Android computer system under car play. So you would then load the Android. You got the Play Store so in the AI box, once you've plugged it in, you've booted a full Android environment. You've got access to the Play Store. You can download Spotify and you can download Netflix and all those streaming platforms and all that stuff that you can't run on your built-in head unit because they don't let you. You know, you can't run movies on a lot of those devices and you can't. It's fair enough, oh fair enough.
Speaker 1:you shouldn't be distracted while you're driving. So in the traffic doing your make-up and watching Watching Game of Thrones is something while you're sitting in the traffic driving to town. Well, you can do that with an.
Speaker 2:Android Auto with one of these AI boxes, because it does circumvent all of those controls. It doesn't break in, it's not dangerous. You haven't voided your warranty. You're not doing anything wrong. Instead of plugging in a phone, you plug it in a different box to your head. Unit looks like a phone, but on there you can run the travel app.
Speaker 1:See, that's why it gets confusing, because you said it makes you think it's an iPhone but the problem is we're not using iPhone apps, we're using Android apps, so that's why it gets a bit confusing, so using an AI.
Speaker 2:I should believe it's an iPad. No, that's why I stumbled and cut you off because I'm going.
Speaker 1:My head's going around that we're turning a car play unit into an Android operating system so that we can install the Google Play Store so that we can access apps. So the issue is, if you're going to go down this path this is how you can access Explorer's Traveler app that you will always only have access to the Google Play Store, buying an Android version of the Traveler app.
Speaker 2:And putting it or any other app, you put it on the little box. So one of the other advantages of little box and it comes to me quite often you go and hire a car or you go travelling somewhere or a friend's car or a friend's car, you're going out with a mate for a four-wheel drive trip somewhere and he's got a spanking new 300 and he wants to show it off to you. You can jump into his car and plug in your AI box straight onto his head unit and run your version of the Explorer's Traveler app in his car and instill upon him how wonderful it is and that he should buy one as well.
Speaker 1:So he just wants to be your mate.
Speaker 2:Well, my mate thought it was fantastic because he just thought he could sit and watch Netflix while he was in the traffic. But you know, it's being able to just take this box with you. If you go and hire a car in a state you can put it in.
Speaker 1:It's great for international travellers coming to.
Speaker 2:Australia, whatever, and you know it'll be great if all the higher companies had them and that you and you come over you could have one. Again, you know it's an Android version. So you know we're talking carplay and an Android. If you're a carplay aficionado, you're probably used to using Apple products. It would be a licensing thing. You would need to get the Explosive Tramler app from the Android Play Store as well, but you know it's a small price to pay these AI boxes. They're in the $250 price point, 200 to 300. They're called an Android AI box and they have it. They'll definitely tell you the version of Android that they're running.
Speaker 2:I think the one we played with was Android 12 the other day and and it worked great and it and it was easy and it's a really good user interface. It emulates the carplay setups quite well. The difference is that it's Android apps and not Apple apps and after all of that you really can't tell much difference. And it does release the ability for anybody With the fancy new car where they don't want to do a head unit replacement.
Speaker 1:Yeah, this is the key to still be able to run the Explorers Tramler app At a much cheaper price point of putting the AI box there rather than pulling the whole head unit out. So you're comparing $250 for your hardware, and I've got some links to a couple of different brands that are available online at the moment from our research. If you want to have a look at those AI box options that we're recommending at the moment, open up the Explorers website, wwwexplorerscom. Click the box on the home page to go to Traveller. That's the Traveller web page. It has everything about the Traveller app that you need to know. Scroll down, open the FAQ tab and everything about head units and all the different options is listed there, including this discussion about the AI box option. As David did allude to, though, in the beginning of this, we are thinking about putting a bit more Development time into these AI boxes to help some of our customers enter that Into that market. So stay tuned. We will be looking at that in the future and we'll have more information coming soon.
Speaker 2:So the last probably thing that we should have a discussion about in terms of Devices that can run the app would be the web app, and the web app is an online extension of the Traveller app. It basically runs in your standard web browser on your desktop computers or on your computers at home. It's basically Functionally limited, so it doesn't do. It doesn't have the tracking interfaces, it doesn't have First destination navigation, it doesn't and I'm that complicated, but I have to say it's designed for truth, planning and browsing.
Speaker 2:And you can just run it on on your, on your web interface it's exactly the same screen controls.
Speaker 2:It looks exactly the same. It syncs perfectly with all of your data. So you know, you do your planning on the web app and then you Go to your car head unit, sync it and all of a sudden, all your planning data has traveled across your trip destination to track logs, your tracks and all that stuff in your places that all come with you, the. As I say, the web app runs in a browser. It's currently the the option to run the web app. You need to be an explorers member to gain access to the web app and that's currently set on a one-time payment per year at $34 or $39, 99 and or 95 and number 95, 95 and um. You do that once a year and you've got access to the web app and so, basically, you can do Everything that you can do in the car, except for the actual navigation parts within the app.
Speaker 1:You can plan Tricks and save them, and therefore that means when you go and pick up your phone or your head unit or your tablet.
Speaker 1:That's the one you're actually going to take with you, the device you're taking with you. It'll bring all that plan across and you just open it up and it's ready to use. After it's been synced, you've then got it all available offline. So it's just a tool To enable you to use a different device without having to buy another version of the app. So you can use a windows pc, a macintosh, an apple mac desktop or a laptop or a laptop, and without having to download and buy a different platforms Version to use that, because maybe you've got pc at home and an ipad in the car or on android. Instead of having to deal with all that licensing, you just do the explorers membership, which has other benefits anyway now and you can and you and and there are.
Speaker 2:With our recent release, or recent update, only in the last two weeks or so, of the web app, we do have a little technological problem. Um, we were, we were browser limited, um, in the platforms that you were able to run the web app on. That limitation has now been removed. It'll basically run on pretty much every devices with the with the latest browsers.
Speaker 1:So that means sapphire, safari, chrome, firefox, edge, opera, all the main ones all the main ones, but make sure it's the latest version. So I've had a couple of people think that they can run it because they've got the latest version, but then they've got an old version.
Speaker 2:I managed to make a work for safari 16, but when you upgrade from safari 16 to safari 17, you'll have to redo the install because it was a different technology. But these things, these things are all sent to tries.
Speaker 1:But it's all possible, but it's all possible.
Speaker 2:It all works and so you do have access, you know, to use the web app as well. So they're all the. They're all the interfaces. We've got android, we've got apple or ii pads, ios. One of the other things we didn't touch on was macos. The mac operating system, a lot like now with windows windows, is now preaching that you can run a lot of Window android apps on windows.
Speaker 2:Apple. You can run your ipad apps, ipad iphone apps on macos. So if you're a macbook user, you can actually download your ipad, your app store version for ios, and run the app On that platform. So you don't have to use a web app if you don't want to. You can actually use the native app. So that, obviously, connecting a gps to that is another challenge and we haven't played with that much. We don't currently document that we support using macos as a navigation platform, but for all intents and purposes I believe it would work. The app we do. Actually, the app will actually run and it does work Correctly in on that device. I haven't tried transporting it and cooking up, so that's another platform, but so we've gone the apple, we've got the android, we've got the windows we know about that and we've got the web app, so that kind of the uis that we use. Someone comes up, says what do you recommend? Any one of those, possibly not the windows.
Speaker 1:We can use. So the beauty of the web app is if you want to use your computer for planning, don't buy the windows version, just use the web app version and then you use a different device and we've just explained why a phone is really good, and so don't think you can't use your phone, because it's actually got the high resolution, it's got fast screen performance because of good cpu and fits in your back pocket.
Speaker 2:So it's very portable.
Speaker 1:It's easy to charge. Gps is already in it. A phone should not be discounted as Well. For me, it's my number one device, okay.
Speaker 2:Um, we're in our car with our head unit. So we've got the head unit, a 10 inch head unit. It sits in the middle of the car. You know where the head unit would sit. Michelle's got a phone bracket On her side. I've got a phone bracket on my side. We've also got the ipad sitting on the center console or michelle's lap when she's working on them, and we use them all at the same time.
Speaker 2:But specifically for me, when I'm driving, I have a one level of map detail on the head unit which is usually A little bit more expanded out, and then on my phone, on my, on the on my right hand side field of view, I can see really close detail. So I I'm zoomed in a lot further. So the differing zoom levels give me the ability to see what's close and what's far. So you know, I might be looking at three or four kilometers in advance on the main head unit. I might be looking at 500 meters in advance on the on the car unit. I can pretty much pick every corner and know where I'm going to have to turn and when I'm going to have to do stuff, because it's all pretty much well mapped out for me, right in front of my face and I've got it on the two devices. So there's nothing wrong with having it on those two devices while you're doing that. And the advantage of having the backup or having the thing on your phone Is that when you get out of the car you can't take the head unit with you you don't want to carry an ipad with you when you go hiking up in the bush but you will take your phone and then. So you're taking your phone and immediately you've got access to all of our walking and walking trails and track information. That's all part of the top of map system and we're publishing walking in Different tracks for walking, cycling and those sorts things as well. So the ability to just keep using the same thing take it out of the car and go for your walk and and have access to all the latest mapping and tools While you're walking or doing all those other activities.
Speaker 2:As of currently out, it's easy and simple and the phones generally all the new phones and everyone's got to have the latest swankiest phone has all the power that you could possibly have. Some people, if you're inheriting phones from your children, it may not be good enough, but but you know all the latest, or certainly all the latest phones for the last few years, have been more than capable Of doing what we do. And don't don't be fooled. You know the ipads and the bits and pieces that we're using um eighth generation. What are we up to now? I think we're up to 10, so we're using an eighth generation ipad.
Speaker 2:For one of them, or, that's for sure, one. There I've got an air for something or other. They're all moving ahead as well. They all work. They all work really well Apple or Apple or Android personal preference. If you're used to one of those and you're happy with your phone and you want to look at a tablet, obviously you can't go. You can't go head unit If you're not in the android Environment, but everything else you pretty much can. So I know you said that we're going to talk about a lot of other things.
Speaker 1:I've just read through my list and we have covered everything. So hope that was really useful for you. And if you do have questions, well, we are more than happy to answer those questions, because we want people to really understand this, because this really does affect how much enjoyment and satisfaction you get from using the explorers travel app. We have put so many features into the app and it's well tested and well robust. We do test older versions of a lot of devices and we do test new versions of a lot of devices and we can give you with all assurance that, as we've just explained, that huge range of device choice Is is available to you.
Speaker 1:Um, it's not difficult and Hopefully that's summarized most of that for you. But, as I said, put some questions if you've got them into the youtube comments that we because we're publishing this podcast both as audio on the spotify and on the podcast podcast, but we're also actually filming this for those that are listening and don't realize that we're filming it and putting it on youtube Just because it gives a bit more interactivity. And, of course, um, we're always available on the normal communication channels through our website.
Speaker 2:All right, so thanks for watching. Make sure you subscribe and, uh, we look forward to catching up with you when next we talk tech. Okay, bye.
