Android map navigation in Cairo

woot! Android map navigation working in Cairo now! See how it works in the following animated sequence. A few cool things to notice:

1- It can start navigation from my location, which it knows by cell tours or GPS
2- I don't write my destination, I speak it out, it travels to google servers, gets recognized and comes back as text
3- It searches local areas, to identify the exact destination
4- then provides turn-by-turn instructions .. woohoo .. the future is now



Now the negatives:
1- No voice instructions .. you actually have to read ;)
2- The choice of routes, is not always what would make sense to me. I'll try to see how can I make it change its routing decisions

Thanks Google

Create Mega Android Playlists from PC

Wanting to create a large playlist for my HTC Hero android based phone, I found out this is a fairly painful task since the obvious method involves adding songs one by one!

Fear not fellow androiders, here is how to create mega playlists easily (although it does involve typing a command OMG :) )

1- Plug in the phone over USB. My phone appears as drive G:
2- Open a terminal window, and "cd" into the Folder containing the music you would like to make a "playlist". In my case

g:
cd MP3/80sMusic

3- Here comes the magic

dir /B > 80s-best-Music.m3u
exit

4- Et voila, the terminal window exits, safely remove your USB disk, turn off the USB connection from the phone and that is it!

Addendum for Linux users
1- Mount your phone on some directory, and "cd" to it. In my case

sudo mount /dev/sdb1 /media/androidy
cd /media/androidy

2- Create the playlist file

cd MP3/80sMusic
ls > 80s-best-Music.m3u

3- Eject and Et voila. It's really almost identical to the Windows case

cd / ; sudo umount /media/androidy

I was pleasently surprised to find that in Android ALL music apps share the same playlists. So that newly created playlist is seen by the built-in Music application, as well as with the 3rd party Music player MixZing. It is also pleasantly surprising that Android seems to scan the whole folder structure for the .M3U files wherever they may be and use them as playlists! Sweet