Tech bytes for tea?

That’s when old school topo skills come in useful.

View from Base HQ of Mount Kinabalu. Taken with Dramatic Tone Art Effect on the Olympus PEN E-P3.

In the interest of packing light and reducing the gadget count, I’d decided to leave behind the TomTom VIA 280 dedicated GPS portable navigation device (PND) at home.

Mt Kinabalu, shrouded in clouds

We were also undecided whether to rent a car to self-drive from Kota Kinabalu to Mount Kinabalu or to take a local tour.

Furthermore,  I’d just installed the equivalent turn-by-turn navigation app from TomTom on an  iPhone 3GS and found it to work as well as the PND while driving around Singapore.

When we arrived at 8pm last night, we found the rental rates at the airport to be reasonable and decided to go for the self-drive option.

Imagine our dismay when we found the iPhone 3GS could not get a GPS fix.

The other iPhone 3G that we had did not have any problems getting a fix so we realized the problem lay with the GPS unit within the iPhone 3GS.

Fresh Bougainvillea enroute to Mount Kinabalu

Fortunately, the 15-minute journey from the airport to the hotel was short and simple, and we managed it through good old verbal instructions from the rental guy and maps from the brochure.

Pekan Nabalu enroute to Mt Kinabalu. Taken using Pop Art effect on Olympus PEN E-P3.

By the time we reached “Le Meridin” hotel (the neon light for the second “e” in Meridien must have burnt out), the iPhone 3GS still couldn’t get a fix.

The next morning, it was the same story, the 3GS couldn’t get a fix even though the 3G could.

Who would have thought a relatively simple and basic module like the GPS would fail on a month-old iPhone (Yes – I know – it’s two generations behind the iPhone 4S).

Stores at Pekan Nabalu. Olympus PEN E-P3 with Pop Art effect.

And the iPhone 3G (Yes – that’s THREE generations behind the iPhone 4S – and proud of that) didn’t have that app installed, and I wasn’t prepared to chalk up huge data roaming fees using the Google Maps app on the 3G.

So it was back to paper maps, driving instructions from the concierge, and old school topographical skills.

We’d driven around the complicated and tiny country roads of the Loire Valley in France on nothing more than paper maps, and surely the single highway route to Mt Kinabalu would be a piece of cake.

Prior to starting off, I ran the route through the Google Maps app on my iPhone 3G to download map data into the app’s cache using the hotel’s free WiFi. That should serve as reference later on during the drive.

Wild squirrel on the alert, at the foothills of Mt Kinabalu.

We made the 2-hour drive to Mt Kinabalu smoothly. There was only one wrong turn prior to reaching the highway and a quick check on the Google Maps app on the iPhone 3G guided us back to the highway and we were on our way.

As in a marathon, most amateurs complete in more than 4 hours, although most choose to do the climb over 2 days, planning the arrival at the peak at sunrise.

After a lunch stop at Pekan Nabalu, we reached the base HQ of Mt Kinabalu. Only at this highest mountain in Malaysia and South East Asia did the iPhone 3GS finally pick up a GPS signal, and it promptly told us we were some 300km away in Bandar Seri Begawan, the capital of Brunei.

After a long while it finally placed us at Mt Kinabalu. All along the way back to Kota Kinabalu, the GPS of the iPhone 3GS kept flip-flopping between our true location and Bandar Seri Begawan, forcing the GPS app to recalculate routes.

Half-way home, the 3GS decided it had had enough. It finally ran out of battery – from the constant search for a GPS signal, as well as its exertions to recalculate routes.

By which time, we’d all but given up on depending on the iPhone. I sure hope TomTom comes up with a GPS app on the Android.