Gadget's Guide to Selecting a Smartphone for Long Distance Hiking

by Gadget (PCT ’08)

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You can just read this document sequentially, or you can search for specific keywords (try ctrl+f, i.e., while holding down the ctrl key, press the ‘f’ key). Or you can click on an item of interest in this menu:

§ Intro

§ List of Uses

§ Purchase Guidelines and Suggestions

o Choosing a carrier

o Read Reviews; don’t need the latest model

o Camera

o GPS

o Durability, keeping unit clean & dry

o Keyboard

o Software, Operating System

§ Some (additional) "Gotcha's" to watch out for

Intro

In the world of light and ultra-light backpacking, an important strategy is to get dual use out of items carried. My sleeping pad is also the back padding for my backpack, dental floss can be used as thread, etc. Perhaps the ultimate in multi-use gear is a smartphone, if a person takes care to select the right item, and spends some upfront time to learn how to use the key features.

A smartphone can serve you as a phone (of course), as a camera, GPS, journal, internet access, book reader, voice recorder, MP3 player, and probably other things as well. While no one of these features is (or should be) critical to the success and safety of a backpacking trip, in aggregate these wrap a lot of nice functionality into one small package.

But there are a lot of potential gotcha's. I thru-hiked the Pacific Crest Trail in 2008 using a smartphone in a number of ways (and hence my trailname, "Gadget"), and learned some things built into the suggestions below. I don't believe you have to be a computer wizard to use one of these, but some upfront time & effort --- and of course money --- will be involved.

Note that while some examples of hardware or software might be referenced in the below, this document is in no way intended to recommend specific hardware or software. Technology moves fast, and what might seem an ideal choice today might be superceded by a better option a month from now, and specific “how to” details are always subject to (sometimes rapid) change. However, I hope that the general ideas, suggestions, and warnings will help you avoid some pitfalls.

If you see anything wrong in this document, or have suggestions of ways to make it better, please send details to brianle8 <at> gmail <dot> com. I don’t promise to incorporate every (or even any) suggested changes or additions, but I do promise to consider them all!

List of Uses

I tersely listed the uses of such a device in the intro above, but let's expand on these a bit:

Phone:

When in range of a cell tower, a phone can be tremendously helpful in coordinating to meet with people or get a ride (to include perhaps a taxi or shuttle), to letting loved ones know that you’re okay, to ask for someone at home to mail you something you need, etc.
As cell phones become more common in general, pay phones are becoming less common.
Picking the right carrier can make all the difference between a sometimes-useful phone device, and an item that’s just useless weight on the trail.
cell carriers build in an answering service so even if the person you want to communicate with isn't home at the time you're in range of a cell tower, you can still pass messages via phone-tag
I've seen reports that we might someday be able to purchase a "smart" satellite phone, perhaps something that combines an existing smartphone set of features with satellite coverage. If not too expensive and sufficiently reliable, this could be great.

Internet

The addition of internet capability is potentially very useful. You can get email, trail reports, search for information about, say, a fire you heard is burning ahead of you on the trail. You can connect with equipment manufacturers and order gear. Two particularly important uses for me were getting weather reports for areas I was headed towards, and uploading entries to my trail journal.
Depending on the quality (bandwidth, speed) of your internet service, you can perhaps also email home pictures, or post them to an online site such as Flikr or to your trail journal.
For my PCT thru-hike, I typed up a trail journal entry for literally every day, and would post these --- along with a picture for each one --- whenever I was in range of a cell tower (this, in fact, is what got me my trail name ...).

Camera

Cell phone cameras are renowned for how limited they are --- at this point in time at least (2008) --- and mine is no exception
The camera built into my smartphone is a 2 megapixel camera with no true zoom, limited features, and it can be a bit slow.
On the other hand, when I take pictures with this device they’re ready to directly upload via my internet connection without having to somehow transfer them, and the default photo resolution results in photo file sizes big enough to show a lot of detail and yet small enough to upload directly --- without having to manipulate the photo to get a size more suitable to internet use.
It's a matter of what's important to you; for my trip, I felt my photos were “good enough” for shots of still scenery and of people.
What it likely won't do well anytime soon is provide wide panoramas, high resolution, telescopic zoom, or a host of features that more high-end cameras offer
I believe that over time, and maybe not that much time, some additional features and quality level more common to a basic point-and-shoot camera will be built in, perhaps with the exception of the zoom. For many people (and for the most part for me), that will be good enough; real camera buffs will carry something bigger and better and hopefully know how to use it!

Book Reader

This is actually useful in multiple ways.
I carried a "library" with me of eBooks, mostly Science Fiction, mind candy stuff, something like 50 books; some freely available (the free library at www.baen.com was a good source) and a few that I purchased. This was useful on occasion in camp or in a hotel room, though more the latter --- time, fatigue, and my limited power budget kept me from reading much in camp.
I also carried two different types of wilderness first aid books. A person could carry plant and animal identification books in electronic form, trail and trail-town information.
Related, of course, is that these devices have a mobile operating system that typically offers applications such as spreadsheets, word processing, etc. With some advance work, I put on my device the electronic manuals for much of the backpacking equipment I carried (I can never remember all the various modes of my altitimeter-watch). I had available to me the addresses of post offices, phone numbers for motels, etc etc.

As an MP3 player, a smartphone offers really two distinct types of functionality:

Music
Audio books

See below for expansion on this topic, but for a person that has spent a little learning time and has the requisite software, this can be quite useful. In my time in the Army I had map reading pounded into me pretty well, yet I nevertheless found it just faster, easier to find the trail again on multiple occasions when it just sort of seemed to peter out or otherwise was obscure. This can be particularly useful in snow (which set of footsteps are the right ones to follow?) or low visibility situations --- whiteout, night hiking. Ditto in cases closer to “civilization” where there are unsigned trail junctions and it’s unclear which is the trail you’re following.

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Purchase Guidelines and Suggestions

Below are some suggestions of things to think about before you buy a device:

Which Carrier do you want to go with?

As of 2008, the clear consensus among thru-hikers was that AT&T and Verizon are the ones to go with for better coverage outside of cities. T-Mobile and Sprint seem to focus more on major population centers, and not on more rural or even less populated areas. I certainly can't promise that this is going to always be true in the particular area that you hike in; note that most if not all of these carriers offer online coverage maps, typically you enter a zip code and they show you what, if any coverage they offer there.
A related issue is the underlying communication standard. AT&T uses the more internationally common GSM standard, Verizon uses the CDMA standard that's limited to the U.S. This was important to me, as at the time I purchased my smartphone, the only model I could find that met all of my other criteria was a GSM phone, so I went with AT&T.
Another key factor about choosing a carrier are the contract options available, including nuances that might not be obvious. For example, I initially started with AT&T via their "pay-as-you-go" plan, with no contract. But I later stumbled upon the fact that their advertised coverage map is only for their contract customers, so I ultimately switched to a contract prior to my long hike. On the plus side, I was really pleased with AT&T's internet plan, which actually dropped in price after I started using it for unlimited internet useage.
Finally, a key thing in picking a carrier is to look at the particular phones that they offer bundled with a new contract. At the time I picked my phone, none of the carriers offered anything that I considered good enough, but that was in 2007 and technology moves quickly. I ended up paying full price for my phone; if a carrier offers a phone that has an acceptable feature mix for you (factoring in various suggestions and issues below), you can likely save a lot of money going that route. From a hasty look at offerings in late 2008, I’m pretty sure that if I were shopping for a “smartphone for the long trail” now that I would opt for one offered by AT&T or Verizon as part of a contract --- as this would likely save a lot of money, assuming you’re okay with binding yourself to a contract.

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Read Reviews; you don't need the absolute latest thing

Hopefully I won't insult your intelligence by suggesting that you look for independent reviews of the smartphone you're considering, whether via a Mobile-device oriented magazine (check bigger bookstores like Barnes and Noble), and/or online venues such as www.cnet.com, www.engadgetmobile.com, etc. In general, searching via a search engine like www.google.com for a particular phone model number will turn up some reviews. Consumer Reports at your local library might also be a good option, though less likely perhaps to cover the most recently available offerings.
Related to this is that if you're going to wait for reviews, you're not likely to want to buy the latest sexiest model phone the day it becomes available.
Also related, I strongly suggest that you buy your smartphone literally months (or at least a month) in advance of your long trip, so that you have time to try out various features, ideally in training hikes in as close approximation as possible to how you envision using it. There’s a definite learning curve to being able to confidently make full use of the various features.

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Camera

On my particular device there are a couple of things that annoy me about my camera --- which is one of the most common applications I use!

The camera "application" is a selfish one; when I turn the camera on (via a dedicated button on the smartphone), it takes over, and the only way to use any other functionality is to turn the camera off, and then turn it on again when I want to take another picture.
Aggrevating this is the fact that I have no way to set defaults for the camera, each time I turn it on it resets to factory defaults. For the most part this is fine, but it defaults to taking rather tall and not-too-wide photos, whereas I prefer to turn the camera sideways and take photos that are wider than tall. Unless I push on-screen buttons (and typically wait a while to do so), pictures taken like this show up sideways when later viewed.
I've actually been satisfied with the resolution of this 2 megapixel camera, recognizing that I'm not going for award-winning stunningly detailed photos, but just a manageable visual record that I can share.
A related issue is storage memory.

While this will hopefully change over time, cell phone cameras tend lack some key features of stand-alone digital cameras, including a true zoom (“digital” zoom does not add any additional detail to the photo, it just limits the field of view and expands it) and a flash.

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Storage Memory

My particular phone has a pretty pathetically small amount of internal storage memory, but allows the use of a microSD card. My device is limited to a 2 Gigabyte card, which might or might not be enough, depending on what you're doing with it. The things that particularly take up space for me are:

Maps for use with the GPS
MP3 music or audiobooks
Photos

I was partially saved in this regard in that as my trip progressed, I deleted map data which freed up room for more photos.
So one thing to check is the type of removeable storage supported (such as a microSD card) and what maximum card size is supported.
The internal storage memory can be significant too, as some applications will require some internal (built-in) storage space. If you try to load a lot of applications on your device, too-limited internal storage could be a problem.

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This key point here is that you want a "true" GPS.

Be careful here; many smartphones advertise that they offer GPS functionality, but the way they operate is that they need to be in range of a cell tower (and maybe more than one) for this to work. Hiking in the backcountry, this is pretty much useless to you.
You want a true GPS built into the device. As of this writing, in 2008, I suggest that you look for one that uses the SiRF Star III chipset, though I'm sure that this will be superceded at some point. There are other standards out there; one I noticed recently is the Qualcomm MSM7200 gpsOne. I don’t know how well or if this would work with backcountry GPS software, but I would guess that it would. I do know that SiRF Star III works well even under a lot of tree cover.
It can be tough to tell for certain if a particular device has a true GPS; for example, the term A-GPS means “assisted GPS”, and can mean that your device must be in range of a cell tower to function, or it could mean that it will simply startup faster if in range of a cell tower but still work fine if not. Another term that might mean you have a true GPS is “built-in GPS receiver”. But ultimately, you’re better off looking at the GPS chipset listed on a spec sheet if you can find that.

You also need software, which might or might not include maps. Since I already owned National Geographic Topo maps, I bought their "PocketTopo" product, which works well enough but is somewhat slow and buggy in my opinion. There are other options, and it's beyond the scope of this document to try to list every possibility. But in general, there are a couple of paths you can go:

Map data is right on the GPS, so you see your location on a map that’s displayed on your smartphone screen, and ideally with your trail shown as well
Carry paper maps with a coordinate system grid (I recommend UTM), and just read the coordinate numbers on the GPS to relate those to where you are on the paper map.

Not to sermonize, but I personally feel that it's important that a person carry paper maps regardless, as well as a compass, and have experience at using these. The device can break, you could lose it, your battery could be dead --- and you don't want to end up lost as a result.

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MP3 player

Despite all my praise for the multi-use smartphone approach, I ultimately ended up carrying a separate, standalone MP3 player. Why?

The storage issue. Limited to 2 GB for everything, I found it too limited to put on the amount and quality (compression level) of music and audiobooks that I wanted
Power: You have a limited power budget for doing all the various things you want to use the device for. By carrying a separate MP3 player, I never had a conflict there, and I conserved smartphone power for more important (or at least "other") uses.
DRM: Digital Rights Management. This was the straw that broke the MP3 camel's back for me. Most sources of audiobooks only support devices that in turn support the DRM standard. My smartphone did not. I bought my audiobooks via www.audible.com, and ultimately selected a very small and light 2 GB MP3 player that did support DRM, one that ran off of a single AAA battery. I would hope that in future, at least, this issue will be resolved, but who knows.
A weird limitation that my particular device has is that I can only hear stereo through the earbuds supplied with the device --- and I hated wearing them. Using off-the-shelf earphones, I only heard mono, in one ear only. I don’t know why, and suspect this isn’t a common problem, but it's another reason I went with a separate MP3 player.
As an aside, the earphones I personally like best are the type that hook behind your ears; I don’t find that the “earbud” types will stay securely in when I’m walking. I also like to have a volume control on the earphone cord so I don’t have to access the device itself for that.

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Voice Recorder

One feature I use quite a bit is the voice recorder. I'll typically make a note, perhaps even while I'm walking, about something I want to do at my next town stop. It's very convenient.
A very key point here however is how easy (or hard) it is to activate. On my device I just push and hold a particular button (physical button on the device body) and I'm in voice recorder mode. If instead I had to navigate through various menus each time I wanted to make a voice recording, I'd likely not bother.

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Power "Budget"

A very key issue is having sufficient battery power to do all the things you want with the device. Some things are more discretionary --- I can live without reading a book at night (though if I’m reading at night I can lower the light level intensity which reduces power consumption. But if I want to take a picture, then I want to take the bloody picture and not worry about whether I have the battery power to do so! If I want a GPS fix, I don't want to have to worry if I have enough power to do that.
One thing that I strongly recommend is that you select a device that has a removeable battery, so you can buy and bring along one or more spares. The original Apple iPhone came out around the time I was looking at options, and I crossed it off my list for this reason alone (it also didn't have a true GPS).
In order to power your device on the trail, you might consider a solar charger. I used a Solio charger that I bought at REI, and it worked well enough, but I always felt like I was on a limited power budget. Of course, a solar charger is a more credible option when hiking in Southern California (where my trip started) than in sometimes cloudier and farther north (latitude) Washington State, where the trip ended. In fact, I ultimately decided to not carry the solar charger in Washington, and if doing it again I’d skip it in the northern part of Oregon too --- too much of the time is spent walking under tree cover. Instead, I just carried more spare batteries as well as the charging cord, and recharged in towns whenever I had the opportunity. More than once I found that if I asked at a little store I was stopped at, they would plug my phone in for me while I resupplied and ate a meal, etc.
Power connector: I ran into people that had purchased the same solar charger that I had, but they found that they couldn't obtain a power "tip" compatible with the device they wanted to charge, or in one case, the device simply refused to be charged by anything but its native charging cord. My device uses the very common "mini-USB" connector; it's helpful to have a fairly common standard, rather than something unique to a particular manufacturer.
A charging cord is worth carrying if you expect to stop often enough in places that allow you to recharge, such as hotels. I carried the power cord for the solar charger --- my solar charger has a built-in battery, and I carried one spare smartphone battery, so in effect I had three batteries. It was still a bit of a pain at times, but workable with experience.
It's worth learning which functions take the most power. Talking on the cell phone takes a lot because you're broadcasting. Using the GPS can take a fair bit. On my phone, in both of those cases, I take care to explicitly turn off the phone and GPS when they're not being used to limit power drain.
One sort of weird problem I had was that the aftermarket battery I bought as a spare was made by another company and didn't quite fit with as tight a tolerance as the original battery. The result is that if the device gets shaken a little or dropped a couple of inches it will literally reboot (cold), whereas with the original battery it's fine.

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Durability; dirt, dust, moisture resistance

There are devices available that are "ruggedized", that can survive a drop of X feet and/or are dust or moisture resistant. Such options might be a bit heavier, and don't offer much selection in terms of other functionality.
I opted to get a device that's not particularly "tough". In wet weather I put it inside a snack-sized ziplock bag; the GPS works fine that way, I have to remove it to use the camera or make a voice recording.
I also purchased a different carrying case for it, one made of a sort of neoprene foam. This connects directly to the shoulder strap on my backpack, so the device is always readily available for taking pictures, voice recording, or as a GPS.

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Keyboard

This might or might not be important to you, but for me, having a good keyboard was important for writing up my journal daily, and for email.
My particular device has a built-in sliding "thumbs" keyboard, and I don't use it. I would have been better off buying the slightly lighter and less expensive alternate model of my device that omits the slide-out keyboard. What I did instead was to purchase a separate wireless (bluetooth) folding keyboard that's close to a "full sized" keyboard. I can touch type with this keyboard, and in fact much of this document was written during breaks in my trip using that keyboard on my smartphone. My particular keyboard weighs, I think something like 6 - 7 oz, uses two AAA batteries, and is branded "Think Outside", also known as the Stowaway Universal Bluetooth Keyboard. It's worked well. It folds pretty small; for safe & dry storage I wrap a little bubble wrap around it and put that into a quart sized ziplock bag and have had no trouble with it.

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Software, Operating System

A smartphone (at least in my own personal terminology) is basically a cell phone added to a PDA with some additional functionality. The “PDA” (Personal Digital Assistant) portion is something you can just think of as a limited sort of mobile computer, and as such it has an operating system and a person can purchase add-on software for it, or in many cases download freeware or shareware programs to extend the functionality.
The available software will depend on the particular operating system used by your smartphone, and possibly by the specific hardware (CPU, etc). Examples of mobile operating systems are Microsoft's Windows Mobile (which my device uses), there are mobile Linux implementations, Symbian, Palm, iPhone OS, Blackberry, and others.
So if there is a specific software application that you know you'll want to use, check out what operating systems it runs on before you select a smartphone.
Software I added to my phone included (note: no recommedations implied, just examples):

PocketTopo to add topographic maps that use my GPS chipset
TomTom, street/automobile oriented GPS software
Book reading software --- I selected Mobipocket Reader, but there are other options
I added a calculator application (freeware) that functions more in a way that I'm used to than the one that came with the phone
I bought a Sudoku game program, though find that I rarely use it on the trail (!)
I installed a mobile version of the Adobe Acrobat reader, though where possible I save documents in MS Word format, as Acrobat is a little tweaky to use on a small device, or at least that's been my experience
I installed a freeware application that displays on my "today" screen (home page for the device) the sunrise and sunset as well as moonrise and moonset times for various locations.
There are certainly more things you might want to consider, such as perhaps photo manipulation software if you're inclined to do that on your device. Available on-device storage memory might limit how many applications you can install, but there are many possibilities. Bottom line is that --- like buying a desktop or laptop computer --- think of any software that you feel that you must have and ensure it will work on your device.

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Some (additional) "Gotcha's" to watch out for

In my (admittedly limited) experience, these devices periodically get themselves into a state where things are just "not working", and you have to force a cold reboot of the device. It's worth knowing ahead of time that you can in fact do that. Sometimes for me it just requires poking a tiny recessed spot on the phone with my stylus and then waiting a while. Less frequently I have to remove the battery and reinsert it; this is another good reason to have a removeable battery, i.e., to have a last-resort method of forcing the device to restart.
I do recommend purchasing a screen protector and installing it early on; this is just a thin, transparent plastic film that sticks on top of your screen to protect it. Unlike with a normal computer, I interact with my smartphone by poking and dragging the stylus across the screen a lot, plus just being in the gritty, dirty outdoors could cause issues. Best to install a screen protector at the very beginning, while your screen is still fresh and unscratched.
Pay attention to where there are external, physical buttons or other controls on the device.

The camera button on mine is in a somewhat odd place, so if I want someone to take my picture with my "camera", it always takes an extra moment to show them how to hold it and what to (somewhat awkwardly) press.
More buttons on the device are a two-edged sword --- it's nice to have more direct one-button control to do various things, but I find that too often I've inadvertantly pushed a button I didn't mean to, and now I have to wait for some application to come up that I don't want, only to close it. Note, however, that at least with some systems, you can go into the system settings are reassign buttons, to include assigning them to do nothing! This can work great until and unless something causes you to reset everything back to factory defaults, in which case you would then need to remember how to go back and reassign the buttons again.

Processor Speed and RAM

In the same way the a person supposedly can never be too young, too thin, or too rich, with any kind of computer you can never have processor that's too fast, nor have too much RAM (memory) nor too much hard disk space. In the latter case, there's likely no "hard disk" on your smartphone; the equivalent of a hard disk (offline storage) is actually shared with working RAM for running programs, but perhaps more important for you overall is the ability to extend that with some sort of add-on memory card.
So within reason, you want a device with good processor speed and a lot of RAM, where what the words "good" and "a lot" are defined to be will change over time. Processor speed and RAM tend to increase in devices over time, but software grows to take advantage of it and it often still seems like we're waiting on slow devices.
One related issue you'll have --- or at least I have --- is that when I install software I'm asked if it should be installed in the native memory of my device, or on my microSD card. I always select the latter, knowing how limited the native memory is, but I also realize that this sort of locks me in to keeping that one microSD card resident at all times. I could swap it out, to make other stuff available (perhaps additional MP3 music, or video if I felt wild and crazy, or whatever), but then because I've installed certain programs on the microSD card, I either have to install them again on the other card, or I've temporarily lost certain functionality. For me, I choose to keep life simple and stick to a single card, though I backed this up to my home computer hard disk before beginning my trip.

“Four bars but can’t make a call”
This is an issue that can be frustrating for both phone conversations and internet use (via your cell phone). Cell phones typically give you what’s actually a crude approximation of “can I reliably make a call”, normally in the form of signal strength bars. “Four bars” (or perhaps in some cases “five bars”) is supposed to mean you have a strong signal, and can expect good and reliable communication. Unfortunately, it’s more complicated.

There’s no industry standard for what those signal strength bars mean
You can have a strong signal without having much of that signal actually being useable to your phone, at this particular place and time
Due to interference (“multipath interference” to be more geeky) your primary signal can be strong but your ability to actually communicate might be poor --- depending on which underlying communication standard your phone (and phone company) use.
If I understand correctly (I’m no expert in this area), the signal strength typically just tells you how well your phone is receiving signal from the nearest cell tower, and might tell you nothing about how well the tower can receive signal from your phone. Cell towers can pump out a powerful signal; your little phone cannot.
While your phone is communicating with the cell tower, information on the quality of signal is exchanged, which is at least part of why signal strength can seem to change while you’re communicating --- an initial estimate might be updated by the actual quality of communication
The best way to know whether a given service works in a given location is to have actually tried it. Fortunately, a hiker by the handle of Halfmile has been accumulating data for the PCT about how well different phone services work in different locations. Even here, however, your mileage may vary. I’ve had the experience of standing side-by-side with a person who was using the same carrier (AT&T in this case) and he had good coverage whereas my phone searched but failed to make a connection with the tower. This stuff is, unfortunately, complicated.

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Conclusion

My apologies if the above seems complicated; it doesn’t have to be tremendously hard to get a smartphone set up to provice some very useful on-trail functionality, I’ve tried to provide enough detail to be useful --- but not to dishearten anyone! If you’re not technically inclined, you might look around for a friendly “resident geek”, perhaps a family member or friend, someone who will help you get your smartphone setup and working in the ways that are most important to you for trail use. Once setup & working and after a little “how to” learning on your part, working with one of these in the field doesn’t have to be terribly complicated. Though to be fair and honest, the more you can understand and have worked through on your own, the better off you’ll be if something inevitably “stops working the way it used to” during the hike.