1 – the obvious one. If, and ONLY IF, you are in an emergency situation you can phone mountain rescue. An emergency does not include running out of jelly babies, or that the cafe on Snowdon’s closed. Phone if someone’s in danger. Often, people ring up and they’d either be ok walking off on their own steam, or the following morning after a rather uncomfortable unplanned night on the mountian.

2 – Entertainment. If you’re wild camping, then you can use it as a radio or an mp3 player for music and audiobooks. This saves on weight, but you may well run out of juice if you fall asleep with the radio on.

You can play your music, or check the weather.

3 – Second rate, back up camera. Maybe the other brands are better, but i’ve not been impressed with the images from my Nokias. The N82 was a bit better, but i’d still rather take my’real’ camera. When it’s too naff for the real camera and you just want a few snaps for the record, you can’t go wrong.

4 – Internet. Yes, some of us go into the hills to get away from it all. A weather forecast however is vital. You can access the Met office website on almost any wap enabled phone, but you’ll need a more modern smartphone with acrobat reader on it to read the MWIS forecasts. It’s also useful to check up on bus times, this works for Snowdonia as the timetables are downloadable as pdf files. You can even refer to them when you’re out of the mobile signal.

5 – As a mapping GPS. This is a clincher for me. Installing Viewranger on my N70 and subsequently my N95 had been quite useful. This piece of software costs a paltry £25 for all the UK national parks (including Ben Nevis as an added bonus) in 1:50,000 scale. Compatibility can be checked here. You can make use of Viewranger if you’ve a compatible phone and a bluietooth GPS. This is what I did eighteen months ago with my N70, and the setup cost me about £75 without the phone.

Bluetooth GPS units are now much cheaper, available for less than £30, and you may be willing to risk a second hand smartphone from Ebay. Even so, the N70 can be found for about £70, giving you a price tag of £125 for a half decent phone (internet, mp3, camera and radio) and a mapping gps solution.

The screenshots below give you an idea of the capability of the software.

The mapping capabilities of Viewranger as seen on the Nokia N95.

The view ranger is useful to identify elusive peaks. There’s also a useful trip computer as on any other GPS.

The killer app / gimmick is the’viewfinder’ feature. This creates a 3d view from your current location and annotates the features. I’ll be honest and say that i thought this was purely a gimmick when i first got it and didn’t use it till a few months back. Then i saw how useful it was for identifying that elusive peak in a strange area.

The only drawback is down to the phone and not the software. The N95 is a notorious battery hog, and i find it struggles to run this software for more than a few hours. I used it exclusively to navigate on the Pembrokeshire Coastal Path from Amroth to Freshwater East, and i had to put a fresh battery in after a matter of hours. I made a few calls and checked the cricket score online in that time, but this sort of battery life is totally unacceptable. Considering that an Asus eee 901 computer has a battery life of 6 hours, a phone should manage twice that. Check the reviews before buying! The newer Nokias will have better battery life with the same features (or the older N70 has a better battery life with little less features).

You can record your route as you walk just as on a normal GPS, export it and view it on your PC mapping software. That’s the only drawback with the software, that it runs only on your mobile. A version on the PC would turn this into the only software you’d need, though the features would not be as good as what’s available on Tracklogs (currently the easiest and most feature packed IMHO) or the other PC mapping packages.

Other than that, it’s similar to using a GPS unit – with a trip computer giving you the information you need, such as speed and so on.

If you just want speed information, then Nokia do a free program caled Sport Tracker - http://research.nokia.com/research/projects/SportsTracker/

Sport Tracker allows you to log your walks, cycles, runs or anything else you wanted on your mobile. It needs a Symbian mobile and a GPS connected to work, and keeps track of distance, time and other statistics and logs them by date. So you can look at the calendar and see what days you did a certain walk, or compare how fast you ran 10km on the 1st of the month to the 30th.

It’s an incredibly simple idea, with parts being similar to the data you’d get from a GPS device. You get speed, distance, altitude, time and a height profile. There’s even a map of your route, which is more useful if you walk on roads that appear on Nokia Maps but does not show them on useful maps like Viewranger. One downside i found is that it provides location, but in latitude and longitude – an option for using the British National Grid would make this a viable GPS replacement. This isn’t a difficult feature to implement, as there are methods of converting from one to another.

This shows the information, mapping and altitude visualisations.

Sports Tracker has various ‘trip computer’ options to suit different users. From hill walkers, to the individual keeping fit by walking in the park at lunchtime.

This piece of software is available for other Symbian Nokias free, and is worth downloading

Finally some tips to make sure you make the most of the above.

Get an aquapac mobile case. This is only £15 or so, and cheaper than a new mobile. Drybags work, but mine failed after a fair bit of use and nearly ruined my phone.

Spare batteries. I’ve got 3 spares on me for my N95. Even if you have a phone with more economical battery use, a spare battery is always useful and not really that expensive.

Check coverage. In Snowdonia, Voda’s pretty good and so is O2. Some areas will only have one network. Beddgelert is orange only, while O2 works better in Capel Curig. Ogwen Cottage gets a signal from Bangor (Voda definite), while places like Pen y Gwryd and Nant Gwynant are dead spots. However, climb up a litte and theres relatively few areas where you’ll go all day without some sort of signal. I was surprised to get a pretty decent, though mercurial, signal at Llyn Du in the middle of the Rhinogydd. I carry a spare orange mobile if i’m walking near Beddgelert, and often leave my better phone at home. I intend to put an 02 sim in it as well (it’s rattling about behind the battery ATM) with a twin sim device – these seem to be as difficult to find as a Labour win in a by-election. Another option is to get a foreign sim card which should roam from network to network, so if there’s a signal you can use it.

Check for network coverage on the following pages; Orange, Voda, O2, T-Mobile, Three. But take them with a pinch of salt! I can see many claims of signals by these operators in locations that never receive a reliable signal.

SILENCE! If you don’t want funny looks from others, keep it on silent on the hills. If you have to make a call from the top, often the only place with a signal, then don’t be the Dom Jolly wannabee shouting “Guess where i am?” I find a quiet spot and make my call, often with an important ETA for whoever’s got the responsiblity to call for help if I or my group don’t appear by a certain time.

Nokia have released their latest mobile, the N82, as an Adventure Pack. This means that you get the phone, a Salomon Raid Revo 20 rucksack and Sports Tracker software. I''ll be reviewing just the phone in this blog entry. With thanks to N Series WOM World for the opportunity to try out some shiny new kit!

This new mobile from Nokia has similar features to the N95. It''s a bit larger, doesn''t slide to reveal the keypad and has a slightly smaller screen. The display though smaller, looks cleaner and ‘whiter’ than the N95. You can even flip the screen from landscape to portrait depending on the way you hold the phone - this really is a cool feature! The keys look tiny at first glance too, but are well defined so reasonably easy to use.

One gripe with the N95 was the atrocious battery life. The N82 is a lot better in this respect, though i''d like to take the phone on a proper wild camping trip to really test it. I got the impression that i''d not need the 3 spare batteries that i went through last time i camped overnight (yes, i flattened 4 batteries just on radio, MP3 and some voice calls - without the use of the GPS!)

The camera is a competent 5 megapixel camera with a Carl Zeiss lens and a Xenon Flash. I thought the flash looked impressive, and was a bit too powerful for some of the close range shots i took. So you need to play with the settings, and probably take some photos without the flash. The lens has a cover, but it''s manual. That means i''m likely to forget the cover''s off and let the lens get all grubby in my pocket. I don''t think the camera will replace my Fuji Finepix, which at 3.5 megapixels still gives me a landscape i''m happier with. I still regret taking my N95 to Scotland and getting mediocre lanscapes - despite my best attempts with the settings.

Wifi connectivity – you can connect the phone to your home wireless network. This is very stable, and i didn’t lose the signal once (the N95 has been rather flaky, but to be fair it has been 3 floors away from the wireless point). There is even a way to use it as a media centre, but i''ve not managed to get that to work wirelessly.

It is also an MP3 player and radio, useful for wild camping. Can play certain types of video files too in Real Player, but does not appear to like the usual windows video files (.avi). You need to know soemthing about different video file formats to get them to run, which is unfortunate. I''m certain that there''s 3rd party software available that can run any video file, but i don''t think it should be necessary to fiddle like that to get the most popular video files to run. A clever feature that Nokia have addedd in recent phones is that you can connect a standard 3.5mm headphone to the mobile rather than the usual proprietry headset. As the headphones are the aerial for the radio i presume the radio will still work with standard headphones, but i have no spare headphones to test! Nokia provide a 2gb memory card as standard, which means that you can use the phone ''as is'' for a while - but you''ll still want to add a 4/8gb card if you''re serious about your music.

A final feature is the N-Gage gaming platform. There''s a racing game and a footy game on there that you can preview, and i thought they were visually impressive. That said, the last console i owned (still have it somewhere!) was a Playstation. No, no numbers, just the original one. Check the screengrab out below if you want an idea of what the games look like. I found the keypad a little awkward to use for the game, but then i''m probably getting towards old fart status.

Nokia Maps. I’ve had this on my N95 for many months now, but took no notice of it. You can use it as a sat nav (but you need some sort of bracket to hold the phone to make this practical) and you can run a simulation to see what it’s like. The full navigation service is only available if you pay, and this is currently €6.49 for a week, €7.99 a month, €59.99 a year or €69.99 for 3 years(note, Euros not £s!). You can get the nav feature free for 3 days as a trial, so you can see if you like it or not. It seems to do the job, and might be suitable for the majority of people who may only need the use of an in car sat nav once or twice a year. Some sort of bracket, though, is essential to get this working.

http://europe.nokia.com/link?cid=EDITORIAL_358059 - for full prices.

The internal GPS is quick. I had no problem getting a satellite fix in the open. It was almost intantaneous the first time i used it (perhaps the phone locks onto signals automatically so that the GPS fires up immediately on demand?) This speed means that the bundled Sport’s Tracker software is a practical proposition (unlike some previous mobile/bluetooth GPS combos i’ve tried to use). I’m sure that View Ranger OS mapping would run like a dream on this phone – but they limit their licences and i wasn’t able to sort this out with them as i had the phone over Christmas. Runs great on the N95, so should be quicker on here. Running an N95 and N82 side by side on Nokia maps demonstrated a clear speed difference – the N95 being frustratingly slow.

I am forced to give 2 verdicts on this phone. As an outdoors phone, that you’d be happy to take with you on a walk or run i’m less impressed. The comments that follow though, are not specifically aimed at the N82, but at all the phones i''ve used recently. I’m yet to see the phone i’m happy to carry about in my pocket or coat, especially as i do most of my outdoor activities in the rain (not out of choice i’d like to add!). I find that they get condensation on the screen, even if it’s not raining. And while a drybag may be the ideal solution, i drowned my N70 in a heavy downpour last June as the drybag was now a wetbag. Now it''s a belt and braces approach. Phone into plastic ziploc bag, ziploc into drybag, drybag into waterproof jacket/trouser pocket. Of course, this means that if it’s raining i can’t really use the phone.

All that’s needed is a water resistant phone. Waterproof would be better, like my wind speed meter that survived a washing machine cycle, but i realise that for practical purposes it may not be marketable. Simple solution i think is an enclosure for the phone that’s waterproof. But i reckon i may be waiting some time before i see the phone i can whack in my rucksack mesh pocket, next to my GPS and laminated map in typically wet Welsh weather.

But, as a general multimedia mobile (or computer as Nokia calls it) it runs smoothly, and isn’t flaky like some of the previous ones i’ve used. Video is smooth and the camera is passable for your usual shots. It doesn’t replace a proper camera for my outdoor photography, but that’s just me. I’m sure the camera will suffice for most purposes. Of course, if you’re an upgrading Nokia owner, you’ll find that the user interface is familiar and easy to get where you’re going. Now i’ve had this for a fortnight, i’ve decided i prefer the fixed phone to the slidy N95, the build quality feels much better, though still on the plasticky side. I''d happily swap this for my N95 tomorrow - that tells you all you need to know!

Price of the N82, with the Salomon Raid Revo pack and Sports Tracker is £399. http://www.nseries.com/index.html#l=campaigns,n82